"Don't talk quite so fast about your fortune, Joe; wait till you've got one," rebuked the pater. "I must say it is grievous news, Letsom. It has upset me." "I am off now to show the letters to Paul," said the colonel. "It will be but neighbourly, as he is a connection of the Fontaines." Shaking hands, he turned away on the road to Islip. The Squire, leaning on the gate, appeared to be looking after him: in reality he was deep in a brown study. "Joe," said he, in a tone that had a sound of awe in it, "this is curious, taken in conjunction with what Alice Tanerton told us yesterday morning." "Well, it does seem rather queer," conceded Tod. "Something like the dream turning up trumps." "Trumps?" retorted the pater. "Truth, then. Poor Alice!" A singular thing had happened. Especially singular, taken in conjunction (as the Squire put it) with this unfortunate news. And when the reader hears the whole, though it won't be just yet, he will be ready to call out, It is not true. But it is true. And this one only fact, with its truth and its singularity, induced me to recount the history. * * * * * On Tuesday morning, the day after the calamity in Ship Street--you perceive that we go back a day--the Squire and Tod turned out for a walk. They had no wish to go anywhere in particular, and their steps might just as well have been turned Crabb way as Timberdale way--or, for that matter, any other way. The morning was warm and bright: they strolled towards the Ravine, went through it, and so on to Timberdale. "We may as well call and see how Herbert Tanerton is, as we are here," remarked the Squire. For Herbert had a touch of hay-fever. He was always getting something or other. The Rector was better. They found him pottering about his garden; that prolific back-garden from which we once saw--if you don't forget it--poor, honest, simple-minded Jack bringing strawberries on a cabbage-leaf for crafty Aunt Dean. The suspected hay-fever turned out to be a bit of a cold in the head: but the Rector could not have looked more miserable had it been in the heart. "What's the matter with you now?" cried the Squire, who never gave in to Herbert's fancies. "Matter enough," he growled in answer: "to have a crew of ridiculous women around you, no better than babies! Here's Alice in a world of a way about Jack, proclaiming that some harm has happened to him." "What harm? Does she know of any?" "No, she does not know of any," croaked Herbert, flicking a growing gooseberry off a bush with the rake. "She says a dream disclosed it to her." The pater stared. Tod threw up his head with a laugh. "You might have thought she'd got her death-warrant read out to her, so white and trembling did she come down," continued Herbert in an injured tone. "She had dreamt a dream, foreshadowing evil to Jack, she began to tell us--and not a morsel of breakfast could she touch."