the door close upon her, and five minutes later saw her whisked away
in the gig by Dick Ellison's side.



CHAPTER VIII.


He continued to stare out of the window long after the gig had
disappeared over the low horizon: a small, nervous, indomitable
figure of a man close upon his sixty-second birthday, standing for a
while with his back turned upon his unwieldy manuscripts and his jaw
thrust forward obstinately as he surveyed the blank landscape.
He had the scholar's stoop, but this thrust of the jaw was habitual
and lifted his face at an angle which gave an "up-sighted" expression
to his small eyes, set somewhat closely together above a long
straight nose. Nose, eyes, jaw announced obstinacy, and the eyes,
quick and fiery, warned you that it was of the aggressive kind which
not only holds to its purpose, but never ceases nagging until it be
attained. In build he was lean and wiry: in carriage amazingly
dignified for one who (to be precise) stood but 5 feet 5 and a half
inches high.

His father had been a non-juring clergyman, one of the many ejected
from their livings on St. Bartholomew's Day, 1662; and he himself had
been educated as a Nonconformist at Mr. Morton's famous academy on
Newington Green, where Daniel Defoe had preceded him as a pupil, and
where he had heard John Bunyan preach. At the conclusion of his
training there he was pitched upon to answer some pamphlets levelled
against the Dissenters, and this set him on a course of reading which