ct of one tortured by the passions of love and
hate: For the first two hours he had led the horse without expression
of any sort on his dark face, his neat soldier's figure garbed in
the costume which had made "Westminister" describe him as a "dreadful
foreign-lookin' man." Now and then he had spoken to the horse; save for
those speeches, of no great importance, he had been silent. For the
next two hours, following the cart, he had used a shovel, and still his
square, short face, with little black moustache and still blacker eyes,
had given no sign of conflict in his breast. So he had passed the day.
Apart from the fact, indeed, that men of any kind are not too given
to expose private passions to public gaze, the circumstances of a life
devoted from the age of twenty onwards to the service of his country,
first as a soldier, now in the more defensive part of Vestry
scavenger, had given him a kind of gravity. Life had cloaked him with
passivity--the normal look of men whose bread and cheese depends on
their not caring much for anything. Had Hughs allowed his inclinations
play, or sought to express himself, he could hardly have been a
private soldier; still less, on his retirement from that office with an
honourable wound, would he have been selected out of many others as a
Vestry scavenger. For such an occupation as the lifting from the streets
of the refuses of Life--a calling greatly sought after, and, indeed, one
of the few open to a man who had served his country--charm of manner,
individuality, or the engaging quality of self-expression, were perhaps
out of place.

He had never been trained in the voicing of his thoughts, and, ever
since he had been wounded, felt at times a kind of desperate looseness
in his head. It was not, therefore, remarkable that he should be liable
to misconstruction, more especially by those who had nothing in common
with him, except that somewhat negligible factor, common humanity. The
Dallisons had misconstrued him as much as, but no more than, he had
misconstrued them when, as "Westminister" had informed Hilary, he "went
on against the gentry." He was, in fact, a ragged screen, a broken
vessel, that let light through its holes. A glass or two of beer, the
fumes of which his wounded head no longer dominated, and he at once
became "dreadful foreign." Unfortunately, it was his custom, on
finishing his work, to call at the "Green Glory." On this particular
afternoon the glass had become three