colliers looked round, moved aside, and disclosed the boy.

“Here he is!” said Mr. Winterbottom.

Paul went to the counter.

“Seventeen pounds eleven and fivepence. Why don’t you shout up when you’re called?” said Mr. Braithwaite. He banged on to the invoice a five-pound bag of silver, then in a delicate and pretty movement, picked up a little ten-pound column of gold, and plumped it beside the silver. The gold slid in a bright stream over the paper. The cashier finished counting off the money; the boy dragged the whole down the counter to Mr. Winterbottom, to whom the stoppages for rent and tools must be paid. Here he suffered again.

“Sixteen an’ six,” said Mr. Winterbottom.

The lad was too much upset to count. He pushed forward some loose silver and half a sovereign.

“How much do you think you’ve given me?” asked Mr. Winterbottom.

The boy looked at him, but said nothing. He had not the faintest notion.

“Haven’t you got a tongue in your head?”

Paul bit his lip, and pushed forward some more silver.

“Don’t they teach you to count at the Board-school?” he asked.

“Nowt but algibbra an’ French,” said a collier.

“An’ cheek an’ impidence,” said another.

Paul was keeping someone waiting. With trembling fingers he got his money into the bag and slid out. He suffered the tortures of the damned on these occasions.

His relief, when he got outside, and was walking along the Mansfield Road, was infinite. On the park wall the mosses were green. There were some gold and some white fowls pecking under the apple trees of an orchard. The colliers were walking home in a stream. The boy went near the wall, self-consciously. He knew many of the men, but could not recognise them in their dirt. And this was a new torture to him.

When he got down to the New Inn, at Bretty, his father was not yet come. Mrs. Wharmby, the landlady, knew him. His grandmother, Morel’s mother, had been Mrs. Wharmby’s friend.

“Your father’s not come yet,” said the landlady, in the peculiar half-scornful, half-patronising voice of a woman who talks chiefly to grown men. “Sit you down.”

Paul sat down on the edge of the bench in the bar. Some colliers were “reckoning”—sharing out their money—in a corner; others came in. They all glanced at the boy without speaking. At last Morel came; brisk, and with something of an air, even in his blackness.

“Hello!” he said rather tenderly to his son. “Have you bestedbo me? Shall you have a drink of something?”

Paul and all the children were bred up fierce antialcoholists, and he would have suffered more in drinking a lemonade before all the men than in having a tooth drawn.

The landlady looked at him de haut en bas,bp rather pitying, and at the same time, resenting his clear, fierce morality. Paul went home, glowering. He entered the house silently. Friday was baking day, and there was usually a hot bun. His mother put it before him.

Suddenly he turned on her in a fury, his eyes flashing:

“I’m not going to the office any more,” he said.

“Why, what’s the matter?” his mother asked in surprise. His sudden rages rather amused her.

“I’m not going any more,” he declared.

“Oh, very well, tell your father so.”

He chewed his bun as if he hated it.

“I’m not—I’m not going to fetch the money.”

“Then one of Carlin’s children can go; they’d be glad enough of the sixpence,” said Mrs. Morel.

This sixpence was Paul’s only income. It mostly went in buying birthday presents; but it was an income, and he treasured it. But—

“They can have it, then!” he said. “I don’t want it.”

“Oh, very well,” said his mother. “But you needn’t bully me about it.”

“They’re hateful, and common, and hateful, they are, and I’m not going any more. Mr. Braithwaite drops his ‘h’s,’ an’ Mr. Winterbottom says ’You was.’”

“And is that why you won’t go any more?” smiled Mrs. Morel.

The boy was silent for some time. His face was pale, his eyes dark and furious. His mother moved about at her work, taking no notice of him.

“They always stan’ in front of me, so’s I can’t get out,” he said.

“Well, my lad, you’ve only to ask them,” she replied.

“An’ then Alfred Winterbottom says, ‘What do they teach you at the Board-school?’ ”

“They never taught him much,” said Mrs. Morel, “that is a fact—neither manners nor wit—and his cunning he was born with.”

So, in her own way, she soothed him. His ridiculous hyper-sensitiveness made her heart ache. And sometimes the fury in his eyes roused her, made her sleeping