"All but one," repeated the temporary barman with knowing emphasis. And he winked as he leant across the bar. "Ah!" "Their reverend ain't here--not much!" "I don't suppose he is. And why is the squire doing this sort of thing on this scale?" "Why, in honour of the victory, to be sure." "What victory?" "Why, the one we've just had in Egypt. Tel-el----but here that is, in the _Bury Post_, and a fair jaw-breaker, too." It was the first newspaper which Robert Carlton had seen for several weeks. His _Standard_ subscription had run out at mid-summer; he had never renewed it. The world had renounced him utterly, and so must he renounce the world. To live as he was living, and yet to have an ear for the busy hum--he could not do it. For already he recognized the startling truth: it was its very completeness which rendered his isolation endurable. Yet his eyes glistened as he ran them down the stirring columns, and his tanned face wore a coppery glow as he returned the paper across the bar. "Thanks very much," he said. "I am glad to have seen that." "Is it the first you've heard of it?" "Yes; I don't often see a paper." The young barman was eyeing him up and down, from the old tweed trousers to the old cloth cap. "On the tramp, are you?" Carlton did not choose to reply. "Yet you seemed to know all about their reverend here!" "Who does not?" cried the man in tweeds, with involuntary bitterness. "Ah, you may well say that! And what do _you_ think of him?" "I think the same as everybody else." "That he's the biggest blackguard unhung?" "Indeed, one of them!" "That's what the young gentleman from the hall say, when he was in here this afternoon. But the governor, Master Palmer--O Lord! how he do hate him! 'Unhung?' he say. 'Why, hangun's too good for him.' An' so it is, come to think of it: to go and do what _he_ done, an' to top all by settun fire to his own church!" "Come," said Carlton, "that wasn't proved." "But everybody know it, bless you!" "Though the charge was dismissed in open court?" "Bah! 'Not guilty, but don't do that again!'" And the stout youth nodded sagely over his tankard's rim. "So that's the opinion of the neighbourhood, is it?" "That is, and that's not likely to change." Carlton was not astonished. He had foreseen this even from the prisoner's dock, in that pause of the proceedings when he had felt ashamed of his facility in self-defence, a haunting doubt of the propriety of his defending himself at all. And yet the virile instinct which had inspired him then was not yet dead in his breast; he could not let all this pass; the conversation was none of his seeking, yet he must say something more. "I have never stuck up for him," he began; "but give even him his due! What possible object could a man have in burning down his own church?"