“Exactly so,” said I.  “Therefore you’ll admit that I’ve a right to the opinion that you ought to be locked up either in a gaol or a lunatic asylum as a danger to the state, and that, having that rightful opinion, I’m justified in not entrusting the safety of my house to one who, in my aforesaid opinion, is either a criminal or a lunatic.”

Dialectically, I had him there.  It afforded me keen enjoyment.  Besides being a John Bull Englishman, I am a cripple and therefore ever so little malicious.

“It’s all very well for you to talk, Major Meredyth,” said he, “but your opinions cost you nothing—­mine are costing me my livelihood.  It isn’t fair.”

“You might as well say,” I replied, “that I, who have never dared to steal anything in my life, live in ease and comfort, whereas poor Bill Sykes, who has devoted all his days to burglary, has seven years’ penal servitude.  No, Gedge,” said I, gathering up the reins, “it can’t be done.  You can’t have it both ways.”

He put a detaining hand on Hosea’s bridle and an evil flash came into his hard grey eyes.

“I’ll have it some other way, then,” he said.  “A way you’ve no idea of.  A way that’ll knock all you great people of Wellingsford off your high horses.  If you drive me to it, you’ll see.  I’ll bide my time and I don’t care whether it breaks me.”

He stamped his foot and tugged at the bridle.  Two or three passers-by halted wonderingly and Prettilove, the hairdresser, moved across the pavement from his shop door where he had been taking the air.

“My good fellow,” said I, “you have lost your temper and are talking drivel.  Kindly unhand my donkey.”

Prettilove, who has a sycophantic sense of humour, burst into a loud guffaw.  Gedge swung angrily away, and Hosea and I continued our interrupted progress down the High Street.  Although I had called his dark menaces drivel, I could not help wondering what it meant.  Was he going to guide a German Army to Wellingsford?  Was he, a modern Guy Fawkes, plotting to blow up the Town Hall while Mayor and Corporation sat in council?  He was not the man to utter purely idle threats.  What the dickens was he going to do?  Something mean and dirty and underhand.  I knew his ways, He was always getting the better of somebody.  The wise never let him put in a pane of glass without a specification and estimate, and if he had not been by far the most competent builder in the town—­ perhaps the only one who thoroughly knew his business in all its branches—­no one would have employed him.

When I next saw Betty, it was in one of the corridors of the hospital, after a committee meeting; she stopped by my chair to pass the time of day.  Through the open doorway of a ward I perceived a well-known figure in nurse’s uniform.

“Why,” said I, “there’s Phyllis Gedge.”

Betty nodded.  “She has just come in as a probationer.”

“I thought her father wouldn’t let her.  I’ve heard—­Heaven knows whether it’s true, but it sounds likely—­that he said if men were such fools as to get shot he didn’t see why his daughter should help to mend them.”