ing John pulled a coin out of his pocket and
made the gesture of tossing.

'Who shall go first!' he explained.

Robert had a queer sensation in his spine as his elder brother spoke to
him for the first time in ten years. He wanted to reply vocally. He had
a most imperious desire to reply vocally. But he could not. Something
stronger even than the desire prevented his tongue from moving.

John tossed the coin--it was a sovereign--and covered it with his hands.

'Tail!' Robert murmured, somewhat hoarsely.

But it was head.

Then they went to bed.

II

The side door of Miss Emery's shop was in Brick Passage, and not in the
main street, so that a man, even a man of commanding stature and
formidable appearance, might by insinuating himself into Brick Street,
off King Street, and then taking the passage from the quieter end,
arrive at it without attracting too much attention. This course was
adopted by John Hessian. From the moment when he quitted his own house
that Friday evening in June he had been subject to the delusion that
the collective eye of Bursley was upon him. As a matter of fact, the
collective eye of Bursley is much too large and important to occupy
itself exclusively with a single individual. Bursley is not a village,
and let no one think it. Nevertheless, John was subject to the delusion.

The shop was shut, as he knew it would be. But the curtained window of
the parlour, between the side-door and the small shuttered side-window
of the shop, gave a strange suggestion of interesting virgin spotless
domesticity within. John cast a fearful eye on the main thoroughfare.
Nobody seemed to be passing. The chapel-keeper of the Wesleyan Chapel
on the opposite side of Trafalgar Road was refreshing the massive
Corinthian portico of that fane, and paying no regard whatever to the
temple of Eros which Miss Emery's shop had suddenly become.

So John knocked.

'I am a fool!' his thought ran as he knocked.

Because he did not know what he was about. He had won the toss, and
with it the right to approach Annie Emery before his brother. But what
then? Well, he did desire to marry her, quite as much for herself as
for his sister's fortune. But what then? How was he going to explain
the tepidity, the desertion, the long sin against love of ten years? In
short, how was he going to explain the inexplicable? He could decidedly
do nothing that evening except make a blundering ass of himself. And
how soon would