Reynolds was still in the kitchen, the missive
was given to the old man with an injunction to use all speed, as the
vicar might be going to bed and the note was important.

John, meanwhile, being left alone sat down near the wounded man's bed and
waited, glancing at the flushed face and staring eyes from time to time,
and wondering whether the fellow would recover. The young scholar had
been startled by all that had occurred, and his ideas wandered back to
the beginning of the evening, scarcely realising that a few hours ago he
had not met Mrs. Goddard, had not experienced a surprising change in his
feelings towards her, had not witnessed the strange scene under the
trees. It seemed as though all these things had occupied a week at the
very least, whereas on that same afternoon he had been speculating upon
his meeting with Mrs. Goddard, calling up her features to his mind as he
had last seen them, framing speeches which when the meeting came he had
not delivered, letting his mind run riot in the delicious anticipation of
appearing before her in the light of a successful competitor for one of
the greatest honours of English scholarship. And yet in a few hours all
his feelings were changed, and to his infinite surprise, were changed
without any suffering to himself; he knew well that, for some reason,
Mrs. Goddard had lost the mysterious power of making him blush, and of
sending strange thrills through his whole nature when he sat at her side;
with some justice he attributed his new indifference to the extraordinary
alteration in her appearance, whereby she seemed now so much older than
himself, and he forthwith moralised upon the mutability of human affairs,
with all the mental fluency of a very young man whose affairs are still
extremely mutable. He fell to musing on the accident in the park,
wondering how he would have acted in Mr. Juxon's place, wondering
especially what object could have led the wretched tramp to attack the
squire, wondering too at the very great anxiety shown by Mrs. Goddard.

As he sat by the bedside, the sick man suddenly moved and turning his
eyes full upon John's face stared at him with a look of dazed surprise.
He thrust out his wounded hand, bound up in a white handkerchief through
which a little blood was slowly oozing, and to John's infinite surprise
he spoke.

"Who are you?" he asked in a strange, mumbling voice, as though he had
pebbles in his mouth.

John started forward in his chair