had been played on him, and at the insolent manner in which the
landlord exulted in it.

'Don't laugh,' he said sharply, 'till you are quite sure you have
got the laugh against me. You shan't have the five shillings for
nothing, my man. I'll keep the bed.'

'Will you?' said the landlord. 'Then I wish you a goodnight's
rest.' With that brief farewell, he went out, and shut the door
after him.

A good night's rest! The words had hardly been spoken, the door
had hardly been closed, before Arthur half-repented the hasty words
that had just escaped him. Though not naturally over-sensitive,
and not wanting in courage of the moral as well as the physical
sort, the presence of the dead man had an instantaneously chilling
effect on his mind when he found himself alone in the room--alone,
and bound by his own rash words to stay there till the next
morning. An older man would have thought nothing of those words,
and would have acted, without reference to them, as his calmer
sense suggested. But Arthur was too young to treat the ridicule,
even of his inferiors, with contempt--too young not to fear the
momentary humiliation of falsifying his own foolish boast, more
than he feared the trial of watching out the long night in the same
chamber with the dead.

'It is but a few hours,' he thought to himself, 'and I can get away
the first thing in the morning.'

He was looking towards the occupied bed as that idea passed through