ng tension on himself to meet Charley
Hannaford's gaze with a deceptive indifference, his heart swelled at the
humiliation of it all. He had escaped from a two years' captivity--and,
Heavens! how he had suffered over there, in France! He had run risks: his
adventures--bating one unhappy blot upon them, which surely did not infect
the whole--might almost be called heroic. And here he was, within a few
hundred yards of home, ignominiously trapped. The worst of it was that
death refused to present itself to him as possible. He knew that he could
save himself by a word: he foresaw quite clearly that he was going to
utter it. What enraged him was the equal certainty that a courageous
man--one with the tradition he ought to have inherited--would behave quite
differently. It was not death, but his own shameful cowardice, that he
looked in the face during those moments.

Into the poacher's eyes there crept his habitual shifty smile.
"You'll have a lot to tell 'em down there, Mr. Walter, without troublin'
about me."

The unhappy lad forced a laugh. "You might say so, if you knew what I've
been through. One doesn't escape out of France in these days without
adventures, and mine would make pretty good reading."

"Surely, sir."

"But if I--if I overlook this affair, it's not to be a precedent, you
understand. I intend to live at home now and look after the estate.
My father will wish it."

"To be sure."

"And stealing's stealing. If I choose to keep my own counsel about this,
you are not to suppose I shall forget it. The others suspect only, but I
_know_; and henceforth I advise you to bear that in mind."

"And much obliged to you, sir. I know a gentleman and can trust his
word."

"So the best advice I can give you is to turn over a new leaf."
Walter turned to go with an air of careless magnanimity, conscious of the
sorry part he was playing, yet not wholly without hope that it imposed
upon the other. "I want to be friends with all my neighbours, you
understand. Good-bye."

He nodded curtly and began to pick his way down the gully with a slowness
almost ostentatious. And as he went he cursed his weakness, and broke off
cursing to reconstruct the scene from the beginning and imagine himself
carrying it off with contemptuous fearlessness, at hand-grips with Charley
Hannaford and defying him. He would (he felt) give the world to see the
look Charley Hannaford flung after him.

The poacher's eyes did indee