--a mere shadow on the breast of the night. Stars began to
sparkle, moths and humming cockchafers sailed by him, a chase of
bats overhead endlessly fell down airy precipices and rose in
long loops of darkling flight: honeysuckle and night-scented
stock tinged with their sweet garden perfume the cool airs from
the moor.

Val lit a cigarette, a rare indulgence. If cigarettes grew on
gooseberry bushes Val would have been an inveterate smoker, but
good Egyptians were a luxury which he could not often afford
The Wanhope agency was ample for his needs, though underpaid as
agencies go: but there was Rowsley, always hard up, uncomplaining,
but sensitive, as a young fellow in his position is sure to be, and
secretly fretting because he could not do as other men did: and there
was Isabel, for whom Val felt the anxiety Mr. Stafford ought to have
felt, and was trying to make the provision Mr. Stafford ought to have
made: and then there was the vicar himself, who laid out a great deal
of money in those investments for which we are promised cent per cent
interest, but upon a system of deferred payment.

Tonight however Val lit a cigarette, and then a second, to the
surprise of Isabel, who saw the red spark on the lawn. She
thought her brother must be tired, and perhaps it really was the
long day without food that made him so restless in mind and so
uneasy. Bernard Clowes had been more than usually cranky that
afternoon. Even the patient Val had had thoughts of throwing up
his job when the cripple made him go through his week's accounts,
scrutinizing every entry and cross-examining him on every
transaction in such a tone as the head of a firm might employ to
a junior clerk suspected of dishonesty. It was Bernard's way: