Dan drew a chair up to a table, took from the breast pocket of his monkey-jacket a bulging parcel in a red print handkerchief (looking like a roadman's dinner), untied the knots of it, and disclosed a quantity of gold and silver coins, and a number of Manx bank notes creased and soiled. These he counted out with much deliberation amid a silence like that which comes between thunderclaps--the Speaker, standing by the fireplace, coughing to compose himself, his wife blowing her nose to get rid of her tears, and no other sounds being audible except the nasal breathing of Dan Baldromma, who had hair about his nostrils. "Count it for yourself; I belave you'll find it right, Sir." "Quite right. I suppose you'll want a receipt?" "If you plaze." The Speaker sat at a small desk, and, as well as he could (for his hand was trembling), he wrote the receipt and handed it across the table. "And now about my lease," said Dan. "What about it?" said the Speaker. "It runs out a year to-day, Sir, and Willie Kerruish, the advocate, was telling me at the Michaelmas mart you were not for renewing it. Do you still hould to that, Mr. Spaker?" "Certainly I do," said the Speaker. "I don't want to enter into discussions, but I think you'll be the better for another landlord and I for another tenant." There was another moment of silence, broken only by Dan's nasal breathing, and then he said: "Mr. Spaker, the Dempster's son has come home in disgrace, they're saying." "What's that got to do with it?" said the Speaker. "My daughter has come home in disgrace, too--my wife's daughter, I mane." Mrs. Gell raised herself in her easy chair. "Was it your girl, then..." she began. "It was, ma'am. Bessie Corteen--Collister, they're calling her." "What's all this to me?" said the Speaker. "She's telling me it's a mistake about the Dempster's son, Sir. It was somebody else's lad did the mischief." "I see you are well informed," said the Speaker. "Well, what of it?" "Cæsar Qualtrough might have prosecuted but he didn't, out of respect for the Dempster," said Dan. "So they _say_," said the Speaker. "But if somebody gave him a scute into the truth he mightn't be so lenient with another man--one other anyway." The Speaker was silent. "There have been bits of breezes in the Kays, they're telling me." Still the Speaker was silent. "Cæsar and me were middling well acquaint when I was milling at Ballabeg and he was hutching at Port St. Mary--in fact we were same as brothers." "I see what you mean to do, Mr. Collister," said the Speaker, "but you can save yourself the trouble. My lad is in this house now if you want to know, but I'm sending him to sea, and before you can get to Castletown he will have left the island." "And what will the island say to that, Sir?" said Dan. "That Archibald Gell, Spaker of the Kays, chairman of everything, and the biggest man going, barring the Dempster, has had to send his son away to save him from the lock-up."