The last that Thomas heard of them was the Captain explaining in his most persuasive words that "By Jove, you know, it would hardly be the thing for me to take to fisticuffs with a low labourer-ruffian, else, by Gad, nothing would have delighted me more than to beat him to a pulp, you know." Thomas turned and gazed in the direction of the speaker as if to invite him to come and try, but the Captain was busy hurrying the ladies into the house, and though near enough to see well the look on Thomas's face, he showed no sign of accepting the implied challenge. It was Mrs. Codling who, brave to the last, and woman-like, gave the parting shot. "Be off, you low blackguard," she screamed, and then disappeared within the house. It afterwards transpired that she caught sight of some of the servants watching the encounter with Wanless from a window, and had much comfort from the blowing up she gave them. Her superfluous temper was thereby wholesomely expended. Thomas Wanless went home that afternoon struggling with a feeling of disappointment in which there mingled a certain degree of shame. He had never entered the Vicar's grounds with the intention of either wrangling with the Vicar or his wife. A desire to expose a scoundrel was his sole motive, and he had felt a sense of the heroic as he proceeded to seek his daughter's betrayer. Had that man abused him, or struck him, or in any way given him the opportunity of letting loose his wrath, he would have, perhaps, felt that a duty had been discharged. Instead of that, Thomas had merely fallen out with a sharp-tongued, not over-sensitive woman, and abused a poor parson who, whatever his failings, had not at the moment the least intention to act otherwise than as a peace-maker. The heroics had all vanished, and in their place was something grotesque and ludicrous. The more Thomas thought of it the more he felt that he had that day vindicated neither his own honour nor his daughter's, and he resolved that henceforth he should bear his sorrows in silence. Perhaps this self-condemnation was not quite reasonable, for Mrs. Codling provoked Wanless most unjustifiably. She, at all events, got no more than she deserved. But the labourer was sensitive and proud, and these feelings made him prefer silent endurance to the loss of self-respect. Could he have foreseen the consequences which seemed at least to flow from his one effort at bringing home to the sinner his sin, he might have had still greater doubts about the wisdom of the course he pursued on that calm October Sunday afternoon.