“Here, I’ve got a secret for you. Shut your eyes.” Jeremy shut them. The major’s hands were at his white waistcoat pocket. “Now don’t you look till you’re on your way home. And I’ll tell you something. You’ve shown excellent taste to-night. You couldn’t have shown better if you were a hundred.” She bent down and kissed him. “Good night,” she said. “Will you write and tell me about the football?” “You bet your life,” he answered, staring at her. That was the favourite oath just then at Thompson’s. She laughed again. Then, bending down, whispered in his ear dramatically: “If I’m ever in trouble and need you, will you come, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing?” “Yes,” he said, his eyes never leaving her face. She kissed him again. VI They were all in the cab rolling homewards. He felt in his pocket; something there in paper. He could tell by the feel of it that it was a sovereign or a shilling. Cautiously he lifted it to the light of the lodge gates. It was _Gold_. He sighed with satisfaction—but the real thing was the silver ring. He sat there, making calculations. “Mrs. Carstairs,” he said suddenly, “if I have threepence a week for eight years, and save it all, could I have enough to be married?” There was no answer. She was apparently sleeping—so he added sotto voce: “And perhaps father will give me sixpence a week after I’m fifteen.” CHAPTER IV SALADIN AND THE BLACK BISHOP I The old town, like human beings, had its moods of excited reminiscence. Why should it not? Now brooding, now suddenly waking into lightning flashes of dramatic history, so that everyone in the place, scarcely knowing why, began to dream of the old days when armoured men fought all the way down the High Street and up again, and the Black Bishop rode on his great horse to the edge of the rock where the cloisters now are and saw the beggarly heretics flung over far down into the waters below; and the peasants had their fair up on the hill above the Pol (and were all so be-drunken that they set the town on fire, so that three-quarters of it was burnt to the ground in 1457, as everyone knows, and the cathedral itself only saved by a miracle); and the meeting of the maidens in the market-place, who brought a flag which they had worked to send to Monmouth in Bridgewater; and the last drowning of a witch—old Mother Huckepinch—in the Pol in 1723; and so farther and farther and farther. History, history, history—it lay thick as dust about the town, and only needed a little stirring of the town’s soil to send the dust up into people’s eyes, making them think of times dead and gone and ghosts closer still about them, perhaps, than they cared to think.