The boy, who did not know Paul, went off, but remembered the incident, which was to form a link in the dark chain of evidence tightening around Paul Ralston. He heard the last note of St. Luke’s bell and the answering ring of other bells floating out to sea, and knew that service was commencing in all the churches. Then he remembered his solo and Elithe. Had she heard of the fray? Had all the people heard of it, and what would they say? He knew what Miss Hansford would say, and laughed as he thought of the epithets she would heap upon Jack. The laugh did him good, and he could think of the sore spot in his side where Jack had struck him. “His fist was like a sledge hammer and would have felled an ox,” he said to himself, beginning to wonder what had happened to rouse Jack to such a pitch. He was in no hurry to go home, for, although he could not think himself in any way to blame, he shrank from meeting his people with a kind of shame that he had been in a broil. At last, when he heard the one o’clock bell, he started for home, which he reached just as the family were sitting down to lunch. He did not care to join them, and bade the maid bring him something to his room. “I’ll take a bath and get cooled off before I see Clarice,” he thought, after his lunch was over. Going to the bath room he divested himself of his light gray coat, noticing as he did so a brown stain on the sleeve, which in his fall had come in contact with a pool of tobacco juice. Paul was very fastidious with regard to his clothes; a misfit or soil of any kind ruined them for him, and Tom Drake, who was in one sense his valet and who was just his height and figure, seldom had need to buy a new garment, as all Paul’s castoffs were given to him. Paul found him on the rear piazza and said to him, “Here, Tom, is another coat I’m through with. There’s a stain on the sleeve. Maybe you can get if off.” Tom was so accustomed to these gifts that he took them as a matter of course, and was very proud of his general resemblance to Paul, whom he admired greatly, trying to walk like him and talk like him as far as possible. He had not yet heard of the trouble with Jack, and did not know why the coat was given to him, unless it were for the stain. Thanking Paul for it, he put it on at once, with the remark that it fitted him to a T. “We do look in our backs as near alike as two peas,” he said to himself when he saw Paul leave the house, habited in another coat nearly the same style and color as the one he was wearing.