‘Kick him out! Fetch some water!’ cried young Saunders, bending over the prostrate figure of his friend. ‘Kick him out, I say!’ he reiterated. He was remarkably small and slender in figure, and doubtless felt that it would be a mockery to attempt the deed himself. Myles turned towards the waiter, who still blocked up the doorway. ‘Well,’ said he, tranquilly, ‘I am waiting; which are you going to do? Kick me out--or let me pass?’ The billiard-marker had made no attempt to interfere. The insults received that very evening from Spenceley rankled in his mind; he was well pleased at the humiliation of the bully. The little waiter looked up for a moment at the tall, muscular, sinewy young man who towered above him, with a pale face, and a look of inflexible determination and power about his eyes and mouth, and a frown of anger, terrible in its intensity, on his brow. He stood aside silently. Myles turned and said, ‘If I’m wanted again about this business, my name is Heywood, and I live on the Townfield. I can easily be found.’ No answer was returned: he composedly picked up his second strap, and walked away. CHAPTER VIII. AFTER-THOUGHTS. ‘What ails thee, Myles?’ asked his sister, as he came into the kitchen. ‘Me? Nothing, lass. Here’s your straps. The new one has had a kind of inauguration, but I reckon it will have done it good more likely than harm.’ ‘What dost mean?’ she asked, staring at him. ‘Oh, nothing!’ said he, with a slight laugh, as he leaned against the mantelpiece with his arms folded behind him, his favourite attitude. ‘Hast changed my book, Myles?’ inquired Edmund. ‘Eh, I clean forgot it,’ replied Myles, with a start. ‘I’m very sorry. Fact is, I was called off, and I never thought of the book again.’ ‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ answered Edmund, who was in high good humour at his mother’s absence. Mary also seemed less constrained, though nothing would have induced her to own that she was glad her mother had left them. She moved about more freely, and as she passed to and fro, ‘putting things to rights,’ she was heard to sing snatches of no less a song of praise than the ‘Old Hundredth.’ And when her household work was done (for Myles’s adventure had not taken long, and it was now barely eight o’clock) she brought her work, and sat down with her brothers; and though there were shadows brooding over them all--darker shadows, and deeper, than they imagined--they formed a very happy trio. Mary especially felt happy and contented. She was devoted to her brothers--loved Edmund with a mother’s and a sister’s love combined, while she looked upon Myles as her ideal of all that was good and manly. He had given her no cause to think otherwise. With regard to her own merits, she was humble; but let any one impeach in the slightest degree those of Myles or Edmund, and she became fierce, proud, and resentful. Something in Myles’s mien to-night disturbed her, she knew not why.