from that at present, and he
continued:

"Probably a man's power of putting on a face is not equal to a girl's.
I detest petty dissensions. Probably I show it when all is not quite
smooth. Little fits of suspicion vex me. It is a weakness, not to play
them off, I know. Men have to learn the arts which come to women by
nature. I don't sympathize with suspicion, from having none myself."

His eyebrows shot up. That ill-omened man Flitch had sidled round by
the bushes to within a few feet of him. Flitch primarily defended
himself against the accusation of drunkenness, which was hurled at him
to account for his audacity in trespassing against the interdict; but
he admitted that he had taken "something short" for a fortification in
visiting scenes where he had once been happy--at Christmastide, when
all the servants, and the butler at head, grey old Mr. Chessington, sat
in rows, toasting the young heir of the old Hall in the old port wine!
Happy had he been then, before ambition for a shop, to be his own
master and an independent gentleman, had led him into his quagmire:--to
look back envying a dog on the old estate, and sigh for the smell of
Patterne stables: sweeter than Arabia, his drooping nose appeared to
say.

He held up close against it something that imposed silence on Sir
Willoughby as effectively as a cunning exordium in oratory will enchain
mobs to swallow what is not complimenting them; and this he displayed
secure in its being his licence to drivel his abominable pathos. Sir
Willoughby recognized Clara's purse. He understood at once how the must
have come by it: he was not so quick in devising a means of stopping
the tale. Flitch foiled him. "Intact," he replied to the question:
"What have you there?" He repeated this grand word. And then he turned
to Mrs. Mountstuart to speak of Paradise and Adam, in whom he saw the
prototype of himself: also the Hebrew people in the bondage of Egypt,
discoursed of by the clergymen, not without a likeness to him.

"Sorrows have done me one good, to send me attentive to church, my
lady," said Flitch, "when I might have gone to London, the coachman's
home, and been driving some honourable family, with no great advantage
to my morals, according to what I hear of. And a purse found under the
seat of a fly in London would have a poor chance of returning intact to
the young lady losing it."

"Put it down on that chair; inquiries will be made, and you will see
Sir Willoughby,"