As he read on and on, his brow grew dark with a scowl, his lips were angrily bitten: the book, properly noticed, would certainly set the world a-longing: and Gerald might experience some difficulty in writing it down. The knowledge did not tend to soften his generally ill-conditioned state of mind, and he flung the last volume on the table with a harsh word. Even at that early stage, some of the damnatory terms he would use to extinguish the book passed through his active brain. Emerging from his retreat towards evening in this genial mood, he made those about him suffer from it. Winny, the non-enduring, might well wish to escape with her helpless children! Gerald departed; to keep an engagement at a white-bait entertainment; and she came to Hamish Channing's. How different were the two men! Hamish Channing's heart had ached to pain at the badness of Gerald's book, for Gerald's sake; had he been a magician, he would have transformed its pages, with a stroke of his wand, to the brightest and best ever given to the world. Gerald Yorke put on the anger of a fiend because Hamish's work was _not_ bad; and laid out his plans to ruin it. "Man, vain man, dressed in a little brief authority, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As make the angels weep." If the world is not entirely made up of these two types of men, the bad and the good, the narrow-hearted and the wide, the kindly generous and the cruelly selfish, believe me there are a vast many of each in it. "It's getting worse and worse," sobbed Winny, continuing her grievances over the tea-table. "I don't mean Gerald now, but the shortness of money and the worry. I know we shall have to go into the workhouse!" "Bless you, don't lose heart!" cried Roland with a beaming face. "_I_ can never lose that again, after the ups and downs in Africa. I'll tell you of one, Mrs. Gerald.--Another piece of muffin, Kitty? there it is.--I and another fellow had had no food to speak of for two days; awfully low we were. We went into a store and they gave us some advertising bills to paste on the walls. Well, somehow I lost the fellow and the bills, for he had taken possession of them. I went rushing about everywhere, looking for him--and that's not so pleasant when your inside's as hollow as an empty herring barrel--but he never turned up again. Whether he decamped with the bills, or whether he was put out of the way by a knock on the head, I don't know to this hour. Anyhow I had to go back to the store the next day, and tell about it. If you'll believe me they accused me of swallowing the bills, or otherwise making away with them, and called for a man to take me into custody. A day and a night I lay in their detention cell, with nothing to eat and the rats running over me. Oh, wasn't it good! One can't be nice, over there, our experiences don't let us be; but I always had a horror of rats. Well, I got over that, Mrs. Gerald."