more clear to Isaac with every step he took after he was forced to get up from his comfortable corner in the settle. But he was still warm without and within, his corduroys keeping the heat of the fire even to the touch after their long baking, and his heart kept up by the strengthened influence of all that he had swallowed. It confused his head a little too, making it drowsy but kindly. It was through a faint little steam as of “summat” warm, dispensing its odours liberally into the air, that he seemed in imagination to see his own door, and the wrathful countenance that would look out from it; but the cold outside made this picture a great deal clearer by degrees, though it did not clear his faculties. His partial obfuscation however did not make him less sensible of his duty towards his master’s godson. He had sacrificed himself, he had incurred all those expressions of the missis’s feelings, which were already prophetically sounding in his ears, for Harry’s sake--and he could not go away now without another word. “As well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb,” he said to himself, when the others went clattering over the bridge and along the branching ways with their heavy boots, almost all of them feeling a good deal of alarm about the sentiments of the missis; but as Isaac lingered in the cold moonlight kicking his heels, the uneasiness grew with every moment that passed. She would hear old Jack Smethurst stumble down the way to his cottage, and she would prepare a still sharper rod in pickle for Isaac later still. “As well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb,” he repeated to himself. How those young fellows did talk! and what could they have to talk about after spending all the blessed night playing their games. Ah! devil’s books those cards were, beguiling folks on and on. Isaac fell half asleep, leaning against a corner in the shadow of the “Red Lion.” The lights were already out in that deserted place. There would be no gleam from the window to keep him a little cheery as he plodded down the waterside. And what a clatter these young fellows made! What could they have to talk about? He leaned against the wall and let his head droop on his breast, and for a minute or two Isaac was blissfully unconscious of everything; but at the end of that time he came to himself suddenly, and felt that his corduroys had got quite cold, and that it was very chilly, that the young men were still talking, and that he had begun to shiver. It was cruelty to keep him there, kicking his heels. All the village seemed so still, no lights anywhere, and the landlord of the “Red Lion” turning the key in the door before he mounted up the creaking stairs to bed. The creaking of these stairs went to Isaac’s heart, and the idea of being up later than the landlord of the tavern, the abode of dissipation, of which the whole valley entertained a wholesome distrust--to be out too, at that terrible hour, and still to have a mile