In the midst of a volley of “curses not loud but deep,” he deposited a few articles of linen and other things in a valise, into which he emptied the contents of a small cash-box. Then from a drawer beneath the bedstead he brought forth a grey wig, a long strait coat, and a pair of green spectacles. “Somehow I thought I should come to this at last,” he said, tossing the things upon the bed and locking the bedroom door. “The luck’s against me.” And then he swore bitterly, and savagely ground his teeth, and coughed, and vowed the direst vengeance against everybody. Taking up a pair of scissors, he cut off his whiskers and moustaches, and wrapped them up in paper. “I must burn them somehow,” he said to himself. “What an ass I must be to get myself into this mess to satisfy my revenge on a boy,--a twopenny-halfpenny clerk whom I ought to have thrashed within an inch of his life.” He went on muttering to himself as he shaved his face clean and bare. He certainly was not improved by the operation. The bad lines about his mouth came out in painful distinctness, now that the hair was gone. Fastening a white band about his neck, Mr. Gibbs next adjusted the grey wig upon the partially bald head, put on the green spectacles, donned the long strait coat, opened his bedroom door, listened attentively for a moment, and then quietly disappeared down-stairs and out at the front. He had an hour’s start of the police, and he maintained his advantage cleverly. No prosecutor appeared at Bow Street against Paul, and the purse was impounded,--“rather a sell for Mr. Gibbs that,” as Williamson said in his quiet amiable way afterwards. The magistrate said Paul left that court an injured young man, without a blemish on his character. * * * * * In the evening Amy and her father returned home, and they would fain have had Paul’s company; but Mr. Williamson begged that they would let Paul spend the evening with him, as he thought he could introduce the lad to a better situation than the one at Westminster. Amy looked the gratitude which she felt for Mr. Williamson’s great kindness, and Mr. Somerton delicately pressed a ten-pound note upon him just “to buy something, you know, in remembrance of the affair--not in the way of payment for a moment, but to buy a ring or something as a token of a father’s gratitude for protecting his son when no friends were near.” Mr. Williamson could not resist the fine fellow, as he said at the Club afterwards, “there was something so noble in the way in which it was done. A true son of the soil that Somerton--a fine noble fellow with his heart in his eyes, and then his splendid daughter standing by and looking so appealingly, by Jove, I took the note, and the young fellow and I went together into Regent Street and spent it.”