‘Don’t be down, Van; don’t be down, my boy,’ said Andrew, rubbing his hands gloomily.

‘I? do I look it?’ Evan answered, laughing.

‘Capital acting!’ exclaimed Raikes.  ‘Try and keep it up.’

‘Well, I hope you’re acting too,’ said Evan.

Raikes let his chest fall like a collapsing bellows.

At the end of five minutes, he remarked:  ’I’ve been sitting on it the whole morning!  There’s violent inflammation, I’m persuaded.  Another hour, and I jump slap from the summit of the coach!’

Evan turned to Andrew.

‘Do you think he’ll be let off?’

’Mr. Raikes?  Can’t say.  You see, Van, it depends upon how Old Tom has taken his bad luck.  Ahem!  Perhaps he’ll be all the stricter; and as a man of honour, Mr. Raikes, you see, can’t very well—­’

‘By Jove!  I wish I wasn’t a man of honour!’ Raikes interposed, heavily.

’You see, Van, Old Tom’s circumstances’—­Andrew ducked, to smother a sort of laughter—­’are now such that he’d be glad of the money to let him off, no doubt; but Mr. Raikes has spent it, I can’t lend it, and you haven’t got it, and there we all are.  At the end of the year he’s free, and he—­ ha! ha!  I’m not a bit the merrier for laughing, I can tell you.’

Catching another glimpse of Evan’s serious face, Andrew fell into louder laughter; checking it with doleful solemnity.

Up hill and down hill, and past little homesteads shining with yellow crocuses; across wide brown heaths, whose outlines raised in Evan’s mind the night of his funeral walk, and tossed up old feelings dead as the whirling dust.  At last Raikes called out: 

‘The towers of Fallow field; heigho!’

And Andrew said: 

’Now then, Van:  if Old Tom’s anywhere, he’s here.  You get down at the Dragon, and don’t you talk to me, but let me go in.  It’ll be just the hour he dines in the country.  Isn’t it a shame of him to make me face every man of the creditors—­eh?’

Evan gave Andrew’s hand an affectionate squeeze, at which Andrew had to gulp down something—­reciprocal emotion, doubtless.

‘Hark,’ said Raikes, as the horn of the guard was heard.  ’Once that sound used to set me caracoling before an abject multitude.  I did wonders.  All London looked on me!  It had more effect on me than champagne.  Now I hear it—­the whole charm has vanished!  I can’t see a single old castle.  Would you have thought it possible that a small circular bit of tin on a man’s person could produce such changes in him?’

‘You are a donkey to wear it,’ said Evan.

‘I pledged my word as a gentleman, and thought it small, for the money!’ said Raikes.  ’This is the first coach I ever travelled on, without making the old whip burst with laughing.  I’m not myself.  I’m haunted.  I’m somebody else.’

The three passengers having descended, a controversy commenced between Evan and Andrew as to which should pay.  Evan had his money out; Andrew dashed it behind him; Evan remonstrated.