er call.

Albert, busy on his chin with a shaving brush, peeped surreptitiously
round the door of the saddle-room, and seeing Ma opposite withdrew
swiftly; but he kept the door ajar as though awaiting something he was
determined not to miss.

Mrs. Woodburn retired indoors, and a few minutes later there came the
noisy clacking of a horse and cart entering the cobbled yard.

Instantly Albert was all alert. He flung a towel about his neck and
looked out.

An ostler from Lewes, known familiarly as Cherry, had pulled up a
dog-cart opposite the pump. The old horse stretched his neck, shook his
collar from his sweating shoulders, and, breathing on the water in the
trough, drank delicately.

Mr. Silver descended from the cart.

He marked the fair lad in the door of the saddle-room and greeted him in
his large and leisurely way:

"Good morning, Albert," he said.

"Morning, sir."

"Where are the other lads?"

"Where they ought to be, sir. In the Lads' Barn, waiting for Miss Boy."

"And why aren't you there?" asked the young man, amused.

Albert, in fact, spent all his spare time of late shaving. Indeed, he
was in the habit of informing those he called his colleagues that unless
he shaved three times a day he wasn't 'ardly decent.

"I got to keep at it, sir," he confided now to Mr. Silver. "Else I gets
it from Miss Boy."

"What d'you get from her?" asked the young man blandly. "A razor?"

Old Cherry chuckled.

"'E larders his chin and then scrapes the soap off," he said. "That
amooses Albert, that does."

The insult left the lad cold; but that was less because the insult was a
feeble one than because his mind was elsewhere.

His eyes and whole attention were on the back of the departing toff.

There was something fascinating to Albert about that back this morning.
He followed the young man with the interest and the undisguised
admiration of a Paris gamin watching an aristocrat go to the guillotine.

As the long back disappeared round a corner, the lad turned to Cherry
and winked.

"Guts," he said.

The ostler led the old horse with dripping muzzle away from the
water-trough. The expression on his face seemed to suggest that the
other was a vulgar fellow.

"Did he talk?" asked Albert.

"Talk!" said Cherry ironically. "To me? Likely, ain't it? He talked all
right. Only he never let on."

Albert had picked up his towel, and was scrubbing away at his chin.

"Plucky little feller," he said. "You'd nev