Nicky-Nan leaned on his stick and the stick shook with his communicated fury. "Try it--try it--try it!" he blazed out. "Try it, you Bodmin fathead!" He shuffled away, nodding his head with wrath. He roamed the cliff-paths for an hour, pausing now and again to lean his back against an out-cropping mass of rock and pass the back of his hand across his eyes, that at first were bloodshot with fury. He had a great desire to kill Policeman Rat-it-all. As his passion died down and he limped forward, to pause and again limp forward, his gait and the backward cast of his eye were not unlike those of a hunted hare. He reached the house door at nightfall, just as Mrs Penhaligon came shepherding her offspring home down the dusky street, 'Biades had yielded to the sleep of exhaustion, and lay like a log in his mother's arms. 'Bert, for no other reason than that he had tired himself out, was sulky and uncommunicative. But 'Beida--whose whole manner ever changed when once she had been persuaded into fine clothes--wore an air of sustained gentility. "Squire Tresawna keeps seven gardeners," she reported. "He has three motor-cars and two chauffeurs. The gardeners keep the front lawn so short with their mowing-machines that 'Biades couldn't possibly have made the front of his blouse in the mess it is unless he had purposely crawled on his stomach to lower me in the eyes of all. When it got to a certain point I pretended to have no connection with him. There was nothing else to do. Then he felt sorry and wanted to hug me in front of everybody. . . . Oh, thank you . . . yes, I've enjoyed myself very much! Mrs Tresawna wears a toque: but I suppose that when you get to a certain position you can carry on with toques long after every one else has given them up. She has two maids; one of them in a grey velours dress that must have been one of Mrs Tresawna's cast-offs, for it couldn't possibly have come out of her wages; though, by the fit, it might have been made for her." A little before ten o'clock Nicky-Nan climbed the stairs painfully to his bedroom, undressed in part, and lay down--but not to sleep. For a while he lay without extinguishing the candle--his last candle. He had measured it carefully, and it reached almost to an inch beyond the knuckle of his forefinger. It would last him a good two hours at least, perhaps three. He lay for a while almost luxuriously, save for the pain in his leg, and watched the light flickering on the rafters. They had a few more days to abide, let Pamphlett's men be never so sharp: but this was his last night under them. His enemies--some of them until this morning unsuspected--were closing in around him. They had him, now, in this last corner. But that was for to-morrow. The very poor live always on the edge of to-morrow; and for that reason the night's sleep, which parts them from it, seems a long time.