ost think as John'll be stuck fast for six or seven hundred, or
eight hundred? Not John! And happen a bit of money'll come in handy to
th' old parson tea-blender, by all accounts.'

'Suppose my father--made some mistake--forgot?'

'Ay!' said Meshach calmly. 'Suppose he did. And suppose he didna'.'

'I believe I'll go and talk to Stanway,' said Twemlow, putting the book
in his pocket. 'Let me see. The works is down at Shawport?'

'On th' cut,'[2] said Meshach.

[2] Cut = canal.

'I can say Alice had asked me to look at the accounts. Oh! Perhaps I can
straighten it out neat----' He spoke cheerfully, then stopped. 'But it's
fifteen years ago!'

'Fifteen!' said Meshach with gravity.

'I'm d----d if I can make you out!' thought Twemlow as he walked along
King Street towards the steam-tram for Knype, where he was staying at
the Five Towns Hotel. Hannah had sped him, with blushings, and rustlings
of silk, from Meshach's door. 'I'm d----d if I can make you out,
Meshach.' He said it aloud. And yet, so complex and self-contradictory
is the mind's action under certain circumstances, he could make out
Meshach perfectly well; he could discern clearly that Meshach had been
actuated partly by the love of chicane, partly by a quasi-infantile
curiosity to see what he should see, and partly by an almost biblical
sense of justice, a sense blind, callous, cruel.

CHAPTER III

THE CALL

It was the Trust Anniversary at the Sytch Chapel, and two sermons were
to be delivered by the Reverend Dr. Simon Quain; during fifteen years
none but he had preached the Trust sermons. Even in the morning, when
pillars of the church were often disinclined to assume the attitude
proper to pillars, the fane was almost crowded. For it was impossible to
ignore the Doctor. He was an expert geologist, a renowned lecturer, the
friend of men of science and sometimes their foe, a contributor to the
'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' and the author of a book of travel. He did
not belong to the school of divines who annihilated Huxley by asking
him, from the pulpit, to tell them, if protoplasm was the origin of all
life, what was the origin of protoplasm. Dr. Quain was a man of genuine
attainments, at which the highest criticism could not sneer; and when he
visited Bursley the facile agnostics of the town, the young and
experienced who knew more than their elders, were forced to take cover.
Dr. Quain, whose learning exceeded even theirs--so the elders