yard gate and walked up the
path.

There she was, sure enough, in her Sunday muslin with the violet
sprig, and her black silk jacket with the bugles, and her arm was
round Joe Wheeler's neck--confound him!--and his arms were round her
waist, both of them. They didn't see me, and I stood for a minute
and looked at them, and but for what I'd swore to Amelia I believe I
should have taken Wheeler by the throat and shaken the life out of
him then and there. But I had swore, and I turned sharp and walked
away, and I never went up to Teesdale's nor to my father's farm, but
I went straight back to Pound's, the man I was bound to, and I wrote
a letter to Jenny and one to Amelia, and in Amelia's I only said--

'DEAR AMELIA,--Thank you very much; you were quite right.

TOM.'

And in the other I said--

Jenny, I've had pretty well enough of you; you can go to the devil
your own way. So no more at present from your sincere well-wisher
TOM.

'P.S.--I'm going for a soldier.'

And I left everything: my master that I was bound to, and my trade
and my father. And I went straight off to London. And I should have
been a soldier right enough but that I fell in with a fireman, and
he persuaded me to go in for that business, which is just as
exciting as a soldier's, and a great deal more dangerous, most
times. And a fireman I was for six or eight years, but I never cared
to walk out with another girl when I thought of Jenny. I didn't tell
my folks where I'd gone, and for years I heard nothing from them.

And one night there was a fire in a street off the Borough--a high
house it was,--and I went up the ladder to a window where there was
a woman screaming, and directly I see her face I see it was Jenny.

I fetched her down the ladder right enough, and she clung round my
neck (she didn't know me from Adam), and said: 'Oh, go back and
fetch my husband.' And I knew it was Wheeler I'd got to go and find.

Then I went back and I looked for Wheeler.

There he was, lying on the bed, drunk.

Then the devil says to me, 'What call have you to go and find him,
the drunken swine? Leave him be, and you can marry Jenny, and let
bygones be bygones'; and I stood there half a minute, quite still,
with the smoke getting thick round me. Then, the next thing I knew,
there was a cracking under my feet and the boards giving way, and I
sprang across to Wheeler all in a minute, as anxious to save him as
if he'd been my own twin brother. There