He bent forward gallantly. “A little pale: it suits some. But you are a fine figure of a girl, Miss Bessie.” She was all in a flutter. Nobody had ever said so much to her before. His tone changed. “I am getting middling hungry, though. Had no breakfast to-day. Couldn’t you scare up some bread from that tea for me, or--” She was gone already. He had been on the point of asking her to let him come inside. No matter. Anywhere would do. Devil of a fix! What would his chum think? “I didn’t ask you as a beggar,” he said, jestingly, taking a piece of bread-and-butter from the plate she held before him. “I asked as a friend. My dad is rich, you know.” “He starves himself for your sake.” “And I have starved for his whim,” he said, taking up another piece. “All he has in the world is for you,” she pleaded. “Yes, if I come here to sit on it like a dam’ toad in a hole. Thank you; and what about the shovel, eh? He always had a queer way of showing his love.” “I could bring him round in a week,” she suggested, timidly. He was too hungry to answer her; and, holding the plate submissively to his hand, she began to whisper up to him in a quick, panting voice. He listened, amazed, eating slower and slower, till at last his jaws stopped altogether. “That’s his game, is it?” he said, in a rising tone of scathing contempt. An ungovernable movement of his arm sent the plate flying out of her fingers. He shot out a violent curse. She shrank from him, putting her hand against the wall. “No!” he raged. “He expects! Expects _me_--for his rotten money!... Who wants his home? Mad--not he! Don’t you think. He wants his own way. He wanted to turn me into a miserable lawyer’s clerk, and now he wants to make of me a blamed tame rabbit in a cage. Of me! Of me!” His subdued angry laugh frightened her now. “The whole world ain’t a bit too big for me to spread my elbows in, I can tell you--what’s your name--Bessie--let alone a dam’ parlour in a hutch. Marry! He wants me to marry and settle! And as likely as not he has looked out the girl too--dash my soul! And do you know the Judy, may I ask?” She shook all over with noiseless dry sobs; but he was fuming and fretting too much to notice her distress. He bit his thumb with rage at the mere idea. A window rattled up. “A grinning, information fellow,” pronounced old Hagberd dogmatically, in measured tones. And the sound of his voice seemed to Bessie to make the night itself mad--to pour insanity and disaster on the earth. “Now I know what’s wrong with the people here, my dear. Why, of course! With this mad chap going about. Don’t you have anything to do with him, Bessie. Bessie, I say!” They stood as if dumb. The old man fidgeted and mumbled to himself at the window. Suddenly he cried, piercingly: “Bessie--I see you. I’ll tell Harry.”