And indeed Long Hicks spent his holiday much like a man who is running after something, or somebody. He took a walking tour of intricate plan, winding and turning among the small streets, up street and down, but tending northward; through Bromley, Bow and Old Ford, and so toward Homerton and the marshes. Meantime Johnny walked to and from his work alone, and brooded. He could not altogether understand his mother’s attitude toward Butson. She had been willing, even anxious, to get rid of him by any process that would involve no disgrace among the neighbours, and no peril to the trade of the shop; he had made her life miserable; yet now she tended the brute’s cuts and bumps as though he didn’t deserve them, and she cried more than ever. As for Johnny himself, he spared Butson nothing. Rather he drew a hideous solace from any torture wherewith he might afflict him. “When are you going to clear out?” he would say. “You’d rather be kept than work, but you don’t like being thrashed, do you? Thrashed by a boy, eh? You’ll enjoy work a deal better than the life I’ll lead you here, I can tell you. I’ll make you glad to drown yourself, mean funk as you are, before I’m done with you! Don’t be too careful with that eye: the sooner it’s well, the sooner I’ll bung it up again!” Bessy marvelled at this development of morose savagery on her brother’s part. With her, though he spoke little, he was kinder than ever, but it was his pastime to bully Butson: who skulked miserably in the house, being in no fit state for public exhibition. As to his search for Nora Sansom, Johnny was vaguely surprised to find himself almost indifferent. It would have been useless to worry his mother about it now, and though he spent an hour or two in aimless tramping about the streets, it was with the uppermost feeling that he should rather be at home, bullying Butson. He had no notion why, being little given to introspection; and he was as it were unconscious of his inner conviction that after all Nora could not be entirely lost. While Butson’s punishment was the immediate concern, and as the thing stood, the creature seemed scarce to have been punished at all. XXXI. LONG HICKS’S holiday had lasted three days, and Mr. Butson’s minor bruises were turning green. It was at the stroke of five in the afternoon, and Bessy was minding shop. From the ship-yard opposite a score or so of men came, in dirty dungaree (for it was Friday), vanguard of the tramping hundreds that issued each day, regular as the clock before the timekeeper’s box. Bessy rose on her crutch, and peeped between a cheese and a packet of candles, out of window. Friday was not a day when many men came in on their way home, because by that time the week’s money was run low, and luxuries were barred. Bessy scarce expected a customer, and it would seem that none was coming.