an admonition she thought peculiarly appropriate to the holy book it guarded. And with the memory of the fly-leaf surged up also the face—the long-forgotten, freckled face of the youngest and most headstrong of the Flynt boys: the Will, flouted as “Carrots,” but in her opinion the handsomest of the batch, who had always loomed over her with such grown-up if genial grandeur, and had given her his bull-roarer and threaded birds’ eggs for her before she had come to think their collection wicked. What a hullabaloo when the boy disappeared—he must have been hardly thirteen, she began computing—and she, the child of nine or so who could have comforted the distracted Martha, had dared say no word, because he had made her swear on that very hymn-book to keep his flight silent. Just as she was permeated by the solemnity of the book and the oath on it, he had thrown it away, she remembered, thrown it into the bushes from the wagon in which he was driving her home from chapel. The details of that forgotten summer Sunday began to come back: most vividly of all, the boy struggling and sobbing when his buttons were cut off. He had been so proud of his new velvet jacket with its manifold rows of blue buttons, and lo! after Sunday-school his father had appeared with a somewhat crestfallen look and a pair of scissors, saying, “You don’t want all this flummery,” while Elder Mawhood—evidently the admonishing angel—had stood grimly by, intoning “Pride is abominable. Wanity must be rooted out.” The boy had choked back his sobs, and apparently found solace in the evening hymns, and was further soothed by being allowed at his own request to drive the party home. It was felt—especially by Martha—some compensation for the buttons was due to him. Thus when the wagon had reached Swash End and the bulk of the Flynt family got off according to custom—mud and weather permitting—and walked up to Frog Farm, leaving Jinny to be driven round the long detour to her home at Blackwater Hall, she was left alone with Will. It was then that, having asked her if she could keep a secret and being assured she could, he informed her to her admiring horror that the moment he had safely delivered her on the road by the Common, he would turn his horse’s head for Harwich, where (stabling the horse and wagon so that his parents might trace his intention) he would take ship as a cabin-boy or a stowaway for America, where he was sure to come across his brother Ben, and never would she see him again in Bradmarsh till he had made his fortune. She could see him now, under a late sunset that was like his hair, with his flashing, freckled face, his blazing blue eyes, and his poor, defaced jacket, the thready stubs of the big buttons showing like scars. Their quaint dialogue came back vividly to her. “Oh, Will, but can’t you make your fortune here?” “No, thank you—no more chapel for me!” “I know it’s hard—and you did look beautiful with the buttons—but isn’t it more beautiful to please God?”