"I don't care," answered Mrs. Caspar. "I see it coming. I always have. And it's just more than I can bear." Mr. Pigott did not understand the cause of the woman's emotion, but he recognized that it was genuine and so respected it. "Well, he's leaving school now," he said more gently. "He'll settle down once he's got his nose to the grindstone." Later, at the meeting of the Bowling Green Committee, in the Moot, the schoolmaster reported Mrs. Caspar's saying to Mr. Trupp. "She's a hard un," he commented. "She's need to be," growled the other. "What's that, Doctor?" asked Mr. Pigott. "If she let go of him, he'd be dead in a month," mumbled Mr. Trupp. "Mr. Caspar would?" The Doctor looked at the grey church-tower bluff against the sky. "But she won't let go," he added. "She's got her qualities." "She has," said Mr. Pigott, treading the green. "She's a diamond--as hard, as keen." The two always sparred when they met and loved their friendly bouts. Both were radicals; but they had arrived at their convictions by very different routes. The schoolmaster had inherited his opinions from tough, dissenting ancestors, the man of science had acquired them from Huxley and Darwin. Politics the pair rarely discussed, except at election time; for on that subject they were in rough agreement. But the two men wrangled genially over religion, the ethics of sport, even the two Caspar boys; for Mr. Trupp was the one man in Old Town who alleged a preference for the younger boy--mainly, his wife declared, because he must be "contrary." Mr. Pigott now told the stubborn man almost with glee the story of Alf's treachery. "What d'ye think of that now?" he asked defiantly. "Why," grunted the Doctor, "what I should expect." "Of course," said the sarcastic Mr. Pigott. "He's got the faults of his physique," continued the other. "He's afraid of a thrashing because he knows it'd kill him. Self-preservation is always the first law of life." "He's a little cur," said Mr. Pigott. "That's what your young Alf is." "I've no doubt he is," replied the Doctor. "You would be too if you'd got that body to live in." "I'd be ashamed," shouted the other. "I'd commit suicide offhand." "The wonder is he's alive at all," continued Mr. Trupp, quite unmoved. "Must have some grit in him somewhere or he'd have died when he was born." "That's you and his mother," said the schoolmaster censoriously. "Saving useless human material that ought to be scrapped. And you call yourself a Man of Science! In a properly ordered community you'd stand your trial at Lewes Assizes, the two of you--for adding to the criminal classes. Now if we were back in the good old days, they'd have exposed Alf at birth--and quite right, too." "Quite so," said Mr. Trupp. "Your Christianity has a lot to answer for, as I've remarked before."