One listener there was, who had received the information with anxiety, though without raising his voice in comment. Olver Lovel, for some days now, had haunted the Waggon of Hay, tolerated though not encouraged by the rustics. So long as he did no harm, made no noise, did not get drunk, and got in nobody’s way, they would not object to his slinking round, surreptitiously finishing up the dregs out of other people’s glasses. They were a little surprised to see him there, for they knew that in the past his brother (who, let them do him justice, saw to it that the zany gave as little annoyance as possible), had put the Waggon strictly out of bounds for Olver. Olver knew it too; he knew also, what they did not know, that the embargo had never been removed, and that the Waggon was as much out of bounds now as it had ever been; but Nicco had been in so strange a mood of late--so strange, inattentive, and lenient a mood--that Olver was ready to run the risk of taking advantage. He did not know what had come over Nicco. Money and food seemed plentiful, although Nicco rarely went out poaching now; he would break into the savings-box and not seem to mind; he had even given Olver, on a bare request, enough money to buy a new smock; and their mother was allowed the matches at night now, for all the world as though Nicco no longer cared whether the house was burnt down about their ears or not. Olver had rejoiced greatly in this new order of things. Day by day he had grown more daring; little acts of insubordination passing unnoticed, he had at last achieved the supreme defiance of creeping down to the Waggon one evening, and had stayed there drinking up the dregs and listening to the conversation, half of which was to him unintelligible and half a source of awe and admiration, until ten o’clock at night. Still Nicco said nothing; did not ask where he had been; did not even comment on his absence from supper. Olver was full of contempt for this new, lax Nicholas--full of contempt, but determined to make hay while the sun shone. No doubt the day would come when Nicco would fly into a rage, recover the matches, give Olver a thrashing, take away his new smock, and the old redoubtable order would be re-established. Somewhere, perversely, secretly, Olver hoped for that day; at present he felt himself a little like a horse allowed his head down a slippery hill. But this small, perverse and secret hope he did not admit even to himself. What! deplore the new system which permitted him to go to the Waggon almost every evening, to beg a twist of tobacco, to sit on the floor near the fire in the chimney corner, to listen, and to look--to look through the tobacco smoke at all the different-coloured spirits in the range of shining bottles, which reflected the tap-room rather in the same distorted way as his own little round mirror; at the steel handles on the bar-counter; at the coloured picture of the Queen and the late