short letter in his small,
upright hand, closed the envelope, addressed and stamped it, and
sauntered out through the low-arched door into the garden.

Dick was sitting alone on the high-carved stone edge of the round pool
where the monks used to wash, and where gold-fish now lived cloistered
lives. A moment of depression seemed to have overtaken that cheerful
personage.

"Come as far as the post-office," said Lord Newhaven.

Dick gathered himself together, and rose slowly to his large feet.

"You millionaires are all the same," he said. "Because you have a house
crawling with servants till they stick to the ceiling you have to go to
the post-office to buy a penny stamp. It's like keeping a dog and
barking yourself."

"I don't fancy I bark much," said Lord Newhaven.

"No, and you don't bite _often_, but when you do you take out the piece.
Do you remember that colored chap at Broken Hill?"

"He deserved it," said Lord Newhaven.

"He richly deserved it. But you took him in, poor devil, all the same.
You were so uncommonly mild and limp beforehand, and letting pass things
you ought not to have let pass, that, like the low beast he was, he
thought he could play you any dog's trick, and that you would never
turn on him."

"It's a way worms have."

"Oh, hang worms; it does not matter whether they turn or not. But cobras
have no business to imitate them till poor rookies think they have no
poison in them, and that they can tickle them with a switch. What a
great hulking brute that man was! You ricked him when you threw him! I
saw him just before I left Adelaide. He's been lame ever since."

"He'd have done for me if he could."

"Of course he would. His blood was up. He meant to break your back. I
saw him break a chap's back once, and it did not take so very long
either. I heard it snap. But why did you let him go so far to start with
before you pulled him up? That's what I've never been able to understand
about you. If you behaved different to start with they would behave
different to you. They would know they'd have to."

"I have not your art," said Lord Newhaven, tranquilly, "of letting a man
know when he's getting out of hand that unless he goes steady there will
be a row, and he'll be in it. I'm not made like that."

"It works well," said Dick. "It's a sort of peaceful way of rubbing
along and keeping friends. If you let those poor bullies know what to
expect they aren't, as a rule, over-anxious to toe th