"Or else," he concluded, "I be purty near the only veteran left about here. There used to be Tom Willett and"--another whose name I have forgotten--"in the town, but they be gone, and I dunno who else there is. And I knows there's ne'er another in this parish. Dessay they'll get a few kiddies from Aldershot. 'Cause there's any amount o' drink...." Well, Bettesworth did not go to the dinner, and I never quite understood why. Possibly he really felt too old for dissipation, even of a decorous kind: still more likely, he dreaded being at once under-valued and patronized, among the "kiddies" from Aldershot. He certainly did well to avoid their company. Long afterwards, when for other reasons I was making inquiries about this dinner, I learnt that the behaviour of some of the guests had been scandalous. Some had been carried away, drunk. Others had taken with them, hidden in their pockets, the means of getting drunk at home. So I was told; but not by the promoters, who had shortly afterwards left the neighbourhood. On this same date (4th November, 1903) Bettesworth informed me of another circumstance which affected him seriously. It was that he had lately been superannuated from his club, which he had joined in July, 1866. At that distant time, when he was still a young man, and a strong one, how should he look forward to the year 1903? By what then seemed a profitable arrangement, he paid his subscription on a lower scale, on the understanding that he would receive no financial help in time of sickness after he was sixty-five years old. He had now passed that age. Henceforth, for a payment of threepence a month, he was to have medical attendance free, and on his death the club would pay for his funeral. He was mighty philosophical over this. For my part, it was impossible to look forward without apprehension to the position he would be in during the approaching winter. A year previously he had shown symptoms of bronchitis. But what was to become of him now, if he should be ill, and have no "sick-pay" upon which to fall back? XXII I think it must have been during the winter we have reached that the village policeman stopped me in the road one night to talk about old Mrs. Bettesworth. He told me, what I vaguely knew, that she was increasingly ill. Once, if not oftener (I write from memory), he had helped get her home out of the road, where she had fallen in a fit; and a fear was upon him that she would come to some tragical end. Then there would be an inquest; Bettesworth might be blamed for omitting necessary precautions; at any rate, trouble and scandal must ensue. The policeman proposed that it would be well if a doctor could see the old woman occasionally, and suggested that through my influence with Bettesworth it might be arranged.