He disregarded the question. "Besides, the number was a hundred and fifteen: that's just the pity." I did not understand: but he had seated himself at table and was running through my iambics. In the third verse he underlined a false quantity with blue pencil and looked up for an explanation. While I confessed the fault, his gaze wandered away from me and fell upon his fingers drumming upon the table's edge. A slant of red sunshine touched the signet-ring on his little finger, which he moved up and down watching the play of light on the rim of the collet. He was not listening. By-and-by he glanced up, "I beg your pardon--" stammered he, and leaving the rest of my verses uncorrected, pointed with his pencil to the concluding one. "That's not Greek," he said. "It's in Sophocles," I contended: and turning up the word in "Liddell and Scott," I pushed the big lexicon under his nose. For a moment he paid no heed to the action; did not seem to grasp the meaning of it. Then for the first and last time in my acquaintance with him he broke into a passion of temper. "What do you mean, Sir? It's offensive, I tell you: a downright offensive, ungentlemanly thing to do! Yes, Sir, ungentlemanly!" He crumpled up my verses and tossed them into the waste-paper basket. "We had better get on with our Tacitus." And "Offensive!" I heard him muttering once more, as he picked up the book and found his place. I began to construe. His outburst had disconcerted me, and no doubt I performed discreditably: but glancing up in some apprehension after a piece of guess-work which even to me carried no conviction, I saw that again he was not attending. After this, by boldly skipping each difficulty as it arose I managed to cover a good deal of ground with admirable fluency. We dined together in silence that evening, and after dinner strolled out to the big filbert-tree under which, for a few weeks in the year, Parson West had his dessert laid and sipped his thin port--an old common-room fashion to which he clung. To the end of his days he had the white cloth removed before dessert, and the fruits and the one decanter set out upon polished mahogany. I glanced at him while helping myself to strawberries and cream. He sat nervously folding and refolding the napkin on his knee. By-and-by he spoke, but without looking at me. "I lost my temper this afternoon, and I beg your pardon, my boy." I began to stammer my contrition for having offended him: but he cut me short with a wave of the hand. "The fact is," he explained, "I was worried by something quite different." "By John Emmet's death," I suggested. He nodded, and looked at me queerly while he poured out a glass of Tarragona. "He was my gardener years ago, before he set up market-gardening on his own account." "That's queer too," said I. "What's queer?" He asked it sharply. "Why, to find a gardener cox'n of a life-boat."