received his brother
with a sort of guarded warmth.

"Lor!" he said, "it's Bert. I thought you'd be coming back some day, and
I'm glad to see you. But I carn't arst you to eat anything, because I
'aven't got anything to eat.... Where you been, Bert, all this time?"

Bert reassured his brother by a glimpse of a partly eaten swede, and was
still telling his story in fragments and parentheses, when he discovered
behind the counter a yellow and forgotten note addressed to himself.
"What's this?" he said, and found it was a year-old note from Edna. "She
came 'ere," said Tom, like one who recalls a trivial thing, "arstin' for
you and arstin' us to take 'er in. That was after the battle and settin'
Clapham Rise afire. I was for takin' 'er in, but Jessica wouldn't 'ave
it--and so she borrowed five shillings of me quiet like and went on. I
dessay she's tole you--"

She had, Bert found. She had gone on, she said in her note, to an aunt
and uncle who had a brickfield near Horsham. And there at last, after
another fortnight of adventurous journeying, Bert found her.

5

When Bert and Edna set eyes on one another, they stared and laughed
foolishly, so changed they were, and so ragged and surprised. And then
they both fell weeping.

"Oh! Bertie, boy!" she cried. "You've come--you've come!" and put out
her arms and staggered. "I told 'im. He said he'd kill me if I didn't
marry him."

But Edna was not married, and when presently Bert could get talk from
her, she explained the task before him. That little patch of lonely
agricultural country had fallen under the power of a band of bullies
led by a chief called Bill Gore who had begun life as a butcher boy and
developed into a prize-fighter and a professional sport. They had been
organised by a local nobleman of former eminence upon the turf, but
after a time he had disappeared, no one quite knew how and Bill had
succeeded to the leadership of the countryside, and had developed his
teacher's methods with considerable vigour. There had been a strain
of advanced philosophy about the local nobleman, and his mind ran to
"improving the race" and producing the Over-Man, which in practice
took the form of himself especially and his little band in moderation
marrying with some frequency. Bill followed up the idea with an
enthusiasm that even trenched upon his popularity with his followers.
One day he had happened upon Edna tending her pigs, and had at once
fallen a-wooing with great ur