vely. Every member was anxious to prove that he had never
liked Freely, as he called himself. Faux was his name, was it? Fox
would have been more suitable. The majority expressed a desire to see
him hooted out of the town.

Mr. Freely did not venture over his door-sill that day, for he knew Jacob
would keep at his side, and there was every probability that they would
have a train of juvenile followers. He sent to engage the Woolpack gig
for an early hour the next morning; but this order was not kept
religiously a secret by the landlord. Mr. Freely was informed that he
could not have the gig till seven; and the Grimworth people were early
risers. Perhaps they were more alert than usual on this particular
morning; for when Jacob, with a bag of sweets in his hand, was induced to
mount the gig with his brother David, the inhabitants of the market-place
were looking out of their doors and windows, and at the turning of the
street there was even a muster of apprentices and schoolboys, who shouted
as they passed in what Jacob took to be a very merry and friendly way,
nodding and grinning in return. "Huzzay, David Faux! how's your uncle?"
was their morning's greeting. Like other pointed things, it was not
altogether impromptu.

Even this public derision was not so crushing to David as the horrible
thought that though he might succeed now in getting Jacob home again
there would never be any security against his coming back, like a wasp to
the honey-pot. As long as David lived at Grimworth, Jacob's return would
be hanging over him. But could he go on living at Grimworth--an object
of ridicule, discarded by the Palfreys, after having revelled in the
consciousness that he was an envied and prosperous confectioner? David
liked to be envied; he minded less about being loved.

His doubts on this point were soon settled. The mind of Grimworth became
obstinately set against him and his viands, and the new school being
finished, the eating-room was closed. If there had been no other reason,
sympathy with the Palfreys, that respectable family who had lived in the
parish time out of mind, would have determined all well-to-do people to
decline Freely's goods. Besides, he had absconded with his mother's
guineas: who knew what else he had done, in Jamaica or elsewhere, before
he came to Grimworth, worming himself into families under false
pretences? Females shuddered. Dreadful suspicions gathered round him:
his green eyes,