n exasperation.
"Take my word that it hasn't happened to me to be in that state for a
year and more. Last night I was mad. I can't give you any reasons. I
thought I was cured but I've trouble in my mind, and a tide swims you
over the shallows--so I felt. Come, sir--father, don't make me mad
again."

"Where did you get the liquor?" inquired Jonathan.

"I drank at 'The Pilot.'"

"Ha! there's talk there of 'that damned old Eccles' for a month to
come--'the unnatural parent.' How long have you been down here?"

"Eight and twenty hours."

"Eight and twenty hours. When are you going?"

"I want lodging for a night."

"What else?"

"The loan of a horse that'll take a fence."

"Go on."

"And twenty pounds."

"Oh!" said Jonathan. "If farming came as easy to you as face, you'd be a
prime agriculturalist. Just what I thought! What's become of that money
your aunt Jane was fool enough to bequeath to you?"

"I've spent it."

"Are you a Deserter?"

For a moment Robert stood as if listening, and then white grew his face,
and he swayed and struck his hands together. His recent intoxication had
unmanned him.

"Go in--go in," said his father in some concern, though wrath was
predominant.

"Oh, make your mind quiet about me." Robert dropped his arms. "I'm
weakened somehow--damned weak, I am--I feel like a woman when my father
asks me if I've been guilty of villany. Desert? I wouldn't desert from
the hulks. Hear the worst, and this is the worst: I've got no money--I
don't owe a penny, but I haven't got one."

"And I won't give you one," Jonathan appended; and they stood facing one
another in silence.

A squeaky voice was heard from the other side of the garden hedge of
clipped yew.

"Hi! farmer, is that the missing young man?" and presently a neighbour,
by name John Sedgett, came trotting through the gate, and up the garden
path.

"I say," he remarked, "here's a rumpus. Here's a bobbery up at Fairly.
Oh! Bob Eccles! Bob Eccles! At it again!"

Mr. Sedgett shook his wallet of gossip with an enjoying chuckle. He was
a thin-faced creature, rheumy of eye, and drawing his breath as from a
well; the ferret of the village for all underlying scandal and tattle,
whose sole humanity was what he called pitifully 'a peakin' at his
chest, and who had retired from his business of grocer in the village
upon the fortune brought to him in the energy and capacity of a third
wife to conduct affairs, while he wandered up and down