"Two stamps, two sheets of paper and two envelopes, please, miss." He clicked four pence together on the counter. Miss Mills rose slowly from her place, went a yard or two, and took down a large book. Frank watched her gratefully. Then she took a pen and began to make entries in it. "Two stamps, two sheets of paper and two envelopes, please." Frank's voice shook a little with anger. He had not learned his lesson yet. Miss Mills finished her entry; looked at Frank with extreme disdain, and finally drew out a sheet of stamps. "Pennies?" she inquired sharply. "Please." Two penny stamps were pushed across and two pennies taken up. "And now two sheets of paper and two envelopes, please, miss," went on Frank, encouraged. He thought himself foolish to be angry. Miss Jamieson uttered a short laugh and glanced at Miss Mills. Miss Mills pursed her lips together and took up her pen once more. "Will you be good enough to give me what I ask for, at once, please?" The whole of Frank blazed in this small sentence: but Miss Mills was equal to it. "You ought to know better," she said, "than to come asking for such things here! Taking up a lot of time like that." "You don't keep them?" Miss Mills uttered a small sound. Miss Jamieson tittered. "Shops are the proper places for writing-paper. This is a post-office." Words cannot picture the superb high breeding shown in this utterance. Frank should have understood that he had been guilty of gross impertinence in asking such things of Miss Mills; it was treating her almost as a shop-girl. But he was extremely angry by now. "Then why couldn't you have the civility to tell me so at once?" Miss Jamieson laid aside a little sewing she was engaged on. "Look here, young man, you don't come bullying and threatening here. I'll have to call the policeman if you do.... I was at the railway station last Friday week, you know." Frank stood still for one furious instant. Then his heart sank and he went out without a word. * * * * * The letters got written at last, late that evening, in the back room of a small lodging-house where he had secured a bed. I have the one he wrote to Jack before me as I write, and I copy it as it stands. It was without address or date. "DEAR JACK, "I want you to do, something for me. I want you to go to Merefield and see, first, Jenny, and then my father; and tell them quite plainly and simply that I've been in prison for a fortnight. I want Jenny to know first, so that she can think of what to say to my father. The thing I was sent to prison for was that I pleaded guilty to stealing a tin of salmon from a child called Mary Cooper. You can see the account of the case in the County Gazette for last Saturday week, the twenty-seventh. The thing I really did was to take the tin from somebody else I was traveling with. He asked me to.