"Let them hush as is afraid--I ain't," he said. And again: "O, am I? Not me.... It's little enough for me, if it does; not the rope, anyway." And later, "Yes, the rope, Cap'en Kemp, as you know well enough; the rope at Newgate Gaol.... Dan Webb, aboard o' the _Florence_.... The _Florence_ that was piled up on the Little Dingoes in broad day.... As you was ordered o' course, but that don't matter.... That's what I want now, an' no less. Think it lucky I offer to pay back when I get--... Well, be sensible--... I'm friendly enough.... Very well." Presently my grandfather, blacker than common about brow and eyes, but a shade paler in the cheek, came into the bar-parlour and opened the trade cash-box--not the one that Mrs. Grimes had hidden among the cinders, but a smaller one used for gold and silver. He counted out a number of sovereigns--twenty, I believe--put the box away, and returned to the back room. And in a few minutes, with little more talk, Mr. Viney was gone. Grandfather Nat came into the bar-parlour again, and his face cleared when he saw me, as it always would, no matter how he had been ruffled. He stood looking in my face for a little, but with the expression of one whose mind is engaged elsewhere. Then he rubbed his hand on my head, and said abstractedly, and rather to himself, I fancied, than to me: "Never mind, Stevy; we got it back beforehand, forty times over." A remark that I thought over afterward, in bed, with the reflection that forty times twenty was eight hundred. But Mr. Viney's talk in the back room brought most oddly into my mind, in a way hard to account for, the first question I put to my grandfather after my arrival at the Hole in the Wall: "Did you ever kill a man, Grandfather Nat?" CHAPTER XV STEPHEN'S TALE The repeated multiplication of twenty by forty sent me to sleep that night, and I woke with that arithmetical exercise still running in my head. A candle was alight in the room--ours was one of several houses in Wapping Wall without gas--and I peeped sleepily over the bed-clothes. Grandfather Nat was sitting with the cash-box on his knees, and the pocket-book open in his hand. He may just have been counting the notes over again, or not; but now he was staring moodily at the photograph that lay with them. Once or twice he turned his eyes aside, and then back again to the picture, as though searching his memory for some old face; then I thought he would toss it away as something valueless; but when his glance fell on the fireless grate he returned the card to its place and locked the box. When the cash-box was put away in the little cupboard at his bed-head, he came across and looked down at me. At first I shut my eyes, but peeped. I found him looking on me with a troubled and thoughtful face; so that presently I sat up with a jump and asked him what he was thinking about.