'You are a quarter of an hour late, William,' said the colonel sternly. 'Where have you been?'
'Do you remember,' he said at last, 'a man called Angus, who was here reporting on Christmas Eve?'
'A painfully powerful-looking man,' said Dowton, 'in hob-nailed boots. I remember him.'
'Well, we have been calling on him,' said Will.
'Calling on him, calling on that impudent newspaper man!' exclaimed the colonel; 'what do you mean?'
'Greybrooke had a row with him some time ago,' said Will; 'I don't know what about, because it was private; but the captain has been looking for the fellow for a fortnight to lick him--I mean punish him. We came upon him two days ago, near the castle gates.'
Here Will paused, as if he would prefer to jump what followed.
'And did your friend "lick" him then?' asked the colonel, at which Will shook his head.
'Well,' said Will reluctantly, 'the fellow wouldn't let him. He--he lifted Greybrooke up in his arms, and--and dropped him over the hedge.'
'The beggar--I mean the fellow--must have muscles like ivy roots,' Will blurted out admiringly.
'I fancy,' said Dowton, 'that I have seen him near the gates several times during the last week.'
'Very likely,' said the colonel shortly. 'I caught him poaching in the Dome some months ago. There is something bad about that man.'
'So, Mr. Greybrooke,' said the colonel, 'I hear you have been in Silchester avenging an insult.'
'I went there,' admitted Greybrooke, blushing, 'to horsewhip a reporter fellow, but he had run away.'
'Yes. Did not Will tell you? We called at the _Mirror_ office, and were told that Angus had bolted to London two days ago.'
'And the worst of it,' interposed Will, 'is that he ran off without paying his landlady's bill.'
'I knew that man was a rascal,' exclaimed the colonel.
'You don't believe it,' repeated her father angrily; 'and why not, pray?'
Mary was wrong. It was quite true that Rob had run away to London without paying his landlady's bill.
The immediate result of his meeting with Miss Abinger had been to make him undertake double work, and not do it. Looking in at shop-windows, where he saw hats that he thought would just suit Mary (he had a good deal to learn yet), it came upon him that he was wasting his time. Then he hurried home, contemptuous of all the rest of Silchester, to write an article for a London paper, and when he next came to himself, half an hour afterwards, he was sitting before a blank sheet of copy paper. He began to review a book, and found himself gazing at a Christmas card. He tried to think out the action of a government, and thought out a ring on Miss Abinger's finger instead. Three nights running he dreamt that he was married, and woke up quaking.