But there was another reason besides his large capital, why Cleg was unusually watchful of his father that day. First of all, Tim Kelly had come home sober from Hare's public the night before. That was a suspicious circumstance in itself. It showed not only that his ready cash had all been liquefied, but that Mistress Hare had drawn a line under the big chalk score behind her door. This line was the intimation that the single file of figures must be wiped off before another dram was served. "Ye've had Larry on your back long enough, sure, Tim!" said Mistress Hare, who regulated these matters in person. "Idleness is a most deadly sin, Father Malony sez!" continued the landlady devoutly. "Shure, an' it's not the divil's sin, thin, Mistress Hare," said Tim acutely, "for he's busy enough!" Tim was the only burglar with a brogue in the city, and as such was dear to the heart of Mistress Hare. For the Scot, when he takes to the investigation of other people's houses, does so grimly and without romance. But Tim had always a hint of Celtic imagination and even of poetry in his creations. For instance, all that day on which Cleg kept his eye on his father, Tim was meditating a raid on the house of Mr. Robert Grey Tennant, a comfortable burgess of the burgh, who for the ease of his later life had built himself—not a lordly pleasure house indeed, but a comfortable mansion of Craigleith stone, exactly like three hundred and sixty-five other mansions on the south side of the city. There was at the back of Aurelia Villa a little bordering of flowers and strawberries. These, however, never came to much, for the cats broke the flowers and extraneous boys stole the strawberries. There was also a little green plot, big enough for parlour croquet, but not big enough for lawn tennis. Yet this did not prevent the serious-minded and inventive young woman of the house, Miss Cecilia Tennant, from frequently playing what she called "pocket-handkerchief tennis" on this scraplet of lawn. And it was indeed a lively game, when two or three of her admirers arrived with racquets and rubber shoes to engage in silk-striped summer strife.