all use in grumbling.

Presently the two naturalists came out again, and the boy went off,
bearing his treasure with him.

'Lucky dog!' said Robert, turning his friend into a country road leading
out of the village, 'he's found one of the rarest moths of the district.
Such a hero he'll be in the Club to-morrow night. It's extraordinary
what a rational interest has done for that fellow! I nearly fought him
in public last winter.'

And he turned to his friend with a laugh, and yet with a little quick
look of feeling in the gray eyes.

'"Magnificent, but not war,"' said Langham dryly. 'I wouldn't have given
much for your chances against those shoulders.'

'Oh, I don't know. I should have had a little science on my side, which
counts for a great deal. We turned him out of the Club for brutality
toward the old grandmother he lives with--turned him out in public. Such
a scene! I shall never forget the boy's face. It was like a corpse, and
the eyes burning out of it. He made for me, but the others closed up
round, and we got him put out.'

'Hard lines on the grandmother,' remarked Langham.

'She thought so--poor old thing! She left her cottage that night,
thinking he would murder her, and went to a friend. At the end of a week
he came into the friend's house, where she was alone in bed. She cowered
under the bed-clothes, she told me, expecting him to strike her. Instead
of which he threw his wages down beside her and gruffly invited her to
come home. "He wouldn't do her no mischief." Everybody dissuaded her,
but the plucky old thing went. A week or two afterward she sent for me
and I found her crying. She was sure the lad was ill, he spoke to nobody
at his work. "Lord, sir!" she said, "it do remind me, when he sits
glowering at nights, of those folks in the Bible, when the Devils inside
'em kep' a-tearing 'em. But he's like a new-born babe to me, sir--never
does me no 'arm. And it do go to my heart, sir, to see how poorly he do
take his vittles!" So I made tracks for that lad,' said Robert, his
eyes kindling, his whole frame dilating. 'I found him in the fields one
morning. I have seldom lived through so much in half an hour. In the
evening I walked him up to the Club, and we re-admitted him, and since
then the boy has been like one clothed and in his right mind. If there
is any trouble in the Club I set him on, and he generally puts it right.
And when I was laid up with a chill in the spring, and the poor fellow
came