Imagining she was about to wish him good-evening in
a more friendly manner than he had expected, he advanced his own hand,
when, to his horror and dismay, he felt a half-crown dropped into it,
with the half-whispered remark, "We are much obliged to you."

He was too staggered to do anything but drop his jaw and stare at the
coin until the last of the party had filed from the room, not even
observing the look of droll sympathy which Raby, the last to depart,
darted at him.

Left to himself, one of his now rare fits of temper broke over him. He
stormed out of the place and up into his room, where, after flinging the
coin into the grate, he paced up and down the floor like an infuriated
animal. Then by a sudden impulse he picked the coin up, and opening a
toolbox which he kept in the room, he took from it a hammer and bradawl.
Two or three vicious blows sufficed to make a hole in the centre of the
Queen's countenance. Then with a brass-headed nail he pinned the
miscreant piece of silver to the wall above the mantelpiece, and sat
looking at it till the storm was over.

It was a week or two before he quite recovered from this shock and
settled down again to the ordinary routine of his life at Wildtree
Towers. As the afternoons became shorter, and out-of-door occupations
in consequence became limited, he found Percy unexpectedly amenable to a
quiet course of study, which greatly improved the tone of that versatile
young gentleman's mind. Percy still resolutely set his face against a
return to school, and offered no encouragement to his perplexed parents
in their various schemes for the advancement of his education.
Consequently they were fain to be thankful, until some light dawned on
the question, that his education was not being wholly neglected, and Mr
Rimbolt in particular recognised that under Jeffreys' influence and
tuition the boy was improving in more ways than one.

The autumn passed uneventfully. Mr Rimbolt had occasion once or twice
to go up to London, and on these occasions Jeffreys was reminded that he
was not on a bed of roses at Wildtree. But that half-crown over the
mantelpiece helped him wonderfully. Raby continued to regard him from a
distance with a friendly eye, and now and then alarmed him by
challenging him to some daring act of mutiny which was sure to end in
confusion, but which, for all that, always seemed to him to have some
compensation in the fellow-feeling it established between the p