m if he has anything to say to me, to write it
down."

"Which he's done, sir," said Betsy, producing a little bit of paper
rolled tightly together, "but I wasn't to give it till I'd asked you to
see him. Oh, please see him, sir, like a dear good gentleman. He looks
like a man as is going off his head."

"He is a fool," said Mr. May, taking the paper, but setting his teeth as
he did so. Evidently he must get rid of this fellow--already beginning
to trouble him, as if he was not the best person to know when and how
far he could go.

"Tell him I'll attend to it, he need not trouble himself," he said, and
put the paper into his pocket, and went on with his dinner. Cotsdean,
indeed! surely there had been enough of him. What were his trumpery
losses in comparison with what his principal would lose, and how dare
that fellow turn up thus and press him continually for his own poor
selfish safety? This was not how Mr. May had felt three months before;
but everything changes, and he felt that he had a right to be angry at
this selfish solicitude. Surely it was of as much consequence to him at
least as to Cotsdean. The man was a fussy disagreeable fool, and nothing
more.

And as it happened they sat late that night at dinner, without any
particular reason, because of some discussion into which Clarence and
Reginald fell, so that it was late before Mr. May got back to his room,
where his books were lying in a heap waiting their transportation. They
seemed to appeal to him also, and ask him reproachfully how they had got
there, and he went to work arranging them all with all the enthusiasm
natural to a lover of books. He was a book-lover, a man full of fine
tastes and cultured elegant ways of thinking. If he had been extravagant
(which he was not) it would have been in the most innocent, nay
delightful and laudable way. To attach any notion of criminality, any
suspicion of wrong-doing to such a virtuous indulgence, how unjust it
would be! There was no company upstairs that evening. Copperhead had
strolled out with Reginald to smoke his cigar, much against the will of
the latter, and was boring him all the way to the College with accounts
of his own lavish expenditure, and how much he had given for this and
that; his cameos, his diamond studs, the magnificent dressing-case which
was the wonder of the Parsonage. "Hang it all, what is the good of
having money if you don't spend it?" said Clarence, and Reginald, who
had not much mon