However, two days after the dinner-party he met Henslowe on the hill leading up to the Rectory. Robert would have passed the man with a stiffening of his tall figure and the slightest possible salutation. But the agent just returned from a round wherein the bars of various local inns had played a conspicuous part, was in a truculent mood and stopped to speak. He took up the line of insolent condolence with the Rector on the impossibility of carrying his wishes with regard to Mile End into effect. They had been laid before the Squire of course, but the Squire had his own ideas and wasn’t just easy to manage. ‘Seen him yet, sir?’ Henslowe wound up jauntily, every line of his flushed countenance, the full lips under the fair beard, and the light prominent eyes, expressing a triumph he hardly cared to conceal. ‘I have seen him, but I have not talked to him on this particular matter,’ said the Rector quietly, though the red mounted in his cheek. ‘You may, however, be very sure, Mr. Henslowe, that everything I know about Mile End, the Squire shall know before long.’ ‘Oh, lor’ bless me, air!’ cried Henslowe with a guffaw, ‘it’s all one to me. And if the Squire ain’t satisfied with the way his work’s done now, why he can take you on as a second string you know. You’d show us all, I’ll be bound, how to make the money fly.’ Then Robert’s temper gave way, and he turned upon the half-drunken brute before him with a few home truths delivered with a rapier-like force which for the moment staggered Henslowe, who turned from red to purple. The Rector, with some of those pitiful memories of the hamlet, of which we had glimpses in his talk with Langham, burning at his heart felt the man no better than a murderer, and as good as told him so. Then, without giving him time to reply, Robert strode off, leaving Henslowe planted in the pathway. But he was hardly up the hill before the agent, having recovered himself by dint of copious expletives, was looking after him with a grim chuckle. He knew his master, and he knew himself, and he thought between them they would about manage to keep that young spark in order. Robert meanwhile went straight home into his study, and there fell upon ink and paper. What was the good of protracting the matter any longer? Something must and should be done for these people, if not one way, then another. So he wrote to the Squire, showing the letter to Catherine when it was done, lest there should be anything over-fierce in it. It was the simple record of twelve months’ experience told with dignity and strong feeling. Henslowe was barely mentioned in it, and the chief burden of the letter was to implore the Squire to come and inspect certain portions of his property with his own eyes. The Rector would be at his service any day or hour.