ood-bye. I shall miss my train you know
if you keep me, and then I'd be exposed again to those--what was the
word? ah, yes--coils. Coils!" He burst into loud laughter. "Good-bye
mater."

She was staring at him blankly. He hastily brushed her forehead with
his moustache and hurried to the door, his face full of strange mirth.
"I say," he said, putting in his head again, "there's just one thing
I'd like to say."

She made an eager step towards him. "Do say it my darling--say all
that is in your heart."

"Oh it's not much--it's only God help poor Tuss." And that was the
last of him. She heard him chuckling all down the passage; but long
before his fly had reached Ullerton he had left off doing that and was
moulting again.

It rained that day in Somersetshire, a steady, hopeless rain that
soaked many a leaf off the trees before its time and made the year
look suddenly quite old. From the windows of Creeper Cottage you could
see the water running in rivulets down the hill into the deserted
village, and wreaths of mist hanging about the downs beyond. The
dripping tombstone that blocked Priscilla's window grew danker and
blacker as the day went by. The fires in the cottage burnt badly, for
the wood had somehow got wet. The oilcloth and the wall-papers looked
very dismal in the grey daylight. Rain came in underneath the two
front doors and made puddles that nobody wiped away.

Priscilla had got up very late, after a night spent staring into the
darkness, and then had sent for Fritzing and told him what Robin had
done. The unhappy man's horror will be easily imagined. She was in bed
the night before when he came in, quite cured of her hunger and only
wanting to be alone with her wrath. Fritzing had found no one in the
parlour but Tussie clasping an immense biscuit-tin in his arms, with a
face so tragic that Fritzing thought something terrible must have
happened. Tussie had returned joyfully, laden with biscuits and
sardines, to find the girl standing straight and speechless by the
table, her face rigid, her eyes ablaze. She had not so much as glanced
at the biscuits; she had not said a single word; her look rested on
him a moment as though she did not see him and then she went into the
next room and upstairs to bed. He knew she went upstairs to bed for in
Creeper Cottage you could hear everything.

Fritzing coming in a few minutes later without the cook he had hoped
to find, was glad enough of Tussie's sardines and biscu