THERE, to his horror, looking through the gap which had been filled by Claude’s spring window, and framed, as it were, by the jagged points of glass which were still sticking to the framework, was a rough-looking man, with a stubbly beard, and a dirty white muffler twisted loosely round his neck. He had only one eye; at least, if the other were there it was hidden by a greasy green patch which was tied round his head by a piece of old string, while his rough, sandy-coloured hair looked as if it had not been touched by a brush and comb for years.

Clearly this strange-looking individual must have been in the summer-house all the time, and have seen the whole of Vivian’s movements, and the little boy found himself wondering, in spite of his terror, how he had escaped being struck by a pellet or cut by a fragment of broken glass. He would fain have turned and run away, but something in the man’s one visible eye held him rooted to the spot, and he remained stock-still, furtively rubbing one foot against the other, longing, and yet half-dreading, to hear the stranger speak and to discover how much he had seen.

‘A pretty mess you’ve made of it, young gentleman,’ said the man at last with a chuckle; ‘and what will the gentleman as you’re staying with say when he sees all this?’

‘It was a mistake,’ stammered Vivian, at a loss what other answer to make.

‘Ho, ho! a mistake was it, young gentleman? And was it a mistake that you took the pistol out of the hole, and put it back again after the smash, looking as scared as ever was, instead of bringing it boldly out of the house with you, like as you would have done if it had been all square?’

‘You’ve no business whose pistol it is, or where I got it,’ said Vivian defiantly, driven to bay by this unexpected retort; ‘and, besides, you have no right to be in my uncle’s garden, and I’ll tell him about you as soon as he comes home from church.’

The man laughed unpleasantly.

‘All very good, young sir,’ he said; ‘but what if I take the first step, and go in and volunteer to tell him all about those blessed windows, and about how nearly you shot me; and, to prove that I am speaking the truth, what if I let him see that nice little hole up there behind, and show him what is hid in it?’

Now, as his mother had said to him on Christmas morning, Vivian had plenty of physical courage, and under other circumstances he would have been quite brave enough to have watched the man until some one either came into the garden or passed outside on the Heath, to whom he might have shouted for help; but, as she had also told him, he was sadly wanting in that other kind of courage which ‘grown-ups’ call ‘moral,’ and the mere threat of exposure made him cringe and beg for mercy from this unwashed, unshaved, evil-looking stranger.

‘Oh, don’t tell—please don’t tell,’ he entreated. ‘It was really a mistake; but I will be punished if it is found out. If you will not tell, and will go quietly away, I’ll give you five shillings. They are in the house, but I can soon get them and they are my very own; my father gave them to me when I came here, and I have never spent them.’

The man laughed again, with a look that was not good to see.

He had lain concealed in the summer-house all morning with an object in view which seemed as if it would be very difficult to carry out, and things had played into his hands in a manner that he had little expected. From his place of concealment he had watched all Vivian’s movements from the time he had come out of the house, and he knew that he had the frightened boy in his power, and could work on his feelings as he would.

‘Five shillings!’ he said contemptuously; ‘five shillings aren’t enough to shut my mouth. You might have killed me with that blooming pistol of yours; more than likely you would have, had I not seen how you were aiming, and lain down on the floor. No, no; you wouldn’t be hiding that pistol if you had come by it in any right way, and I’ll consider it my dooty to report to the master of the house, no matter what the consequences be to myself.’

The man spoke in such a tone of virtuous indignation that Vivian felt that his uncle would believe his word at once, in spite of his ragged clothes and the dirty green patch over his eye.

‘How much would it take to make you go quietly away, and hold your tongue?’ he asked. ‘I have more money in my purse at home, and if you gave me your address I would send it to you.’

The man shook his head in a decided way.

‘It would take pounds and pounds to make me hold my tongue,’ he said, ‘for I am a determined man when once I have made up my mind what it is my dooty to do. But I tell you what, young gentleman. There is one little job which I came in here to do, but which I may not have a chance of doing—’twould keep me too long, and I am a very busy man. Perhaps if you could manage it for me I might not tell after all. It’s a very simple thing, and I only promised to do it to please a little cripple girl of mine at home.’

‘And what is it?’ asked Vivian eagerly, catching at any straw which promised escape from the disclosures which he felt were staring him in the face.

‘Well,’ said the man slowly, and his voice sounded quite soft and gentle, ‘I make a living by breeding dogs, and I have a little cripple girl at home, and she has nothing to do but to lie in bed all day, and it gets wearisome for her at times; and to cheer her up I sometimes put the puppies on her bed, and she plays with them, and she grows as fond of them as if they were human beings like herself. There was one black retriever puppy in particular, which was born on her birthday, which I used to tell her she treated as if it were a baby, for she would save bits of her own supper for it, and it grew so fond of her it always slept at the foot of her bed. If I had been rich I would always have kept it for her; but I am a poor man, young gentleman, and when it got big it ate a lot, and I had to sell it, and the parting well-nigh broke Tottie’s heart. The coachman here came and bought it for his master for a watch-dog, and whenever I come on business to this part of London—I live down Shoreditch way—Tottie always asks if I have seen her pet. Generally I have to tell her “No,” for the coachman here is a disobliging cove, an’ if he saw a poor man like me hanging about the gates he’d order me off; but to-day, being Tottie’s birthday, an’ the dog’s too of course, an’ I happening to come up to ’Ighgate on business, she gave me two of her birthday cakes as a neighbour had given her, an’ she says, “Daddy,” she says, “you’ll see Monarch, an’ you’ll give him these from me, an’ when I am eating mine at supper-time I’ll know he’ll be eating his share.”’

The man paused, and drew two curious little brown buns from his pocket.

‘What queer-looking cakes!’ said Vivian, who had grown interested in the story in spite of his own fears.

‘Yes,’ replied the man; ‘these are German cakes. The woman as lives below us, and is kind to Tottie, is a German, and she bakes the most curious cakes. She has a shop, and makes quite a business of it. Tottie just loves this kind, and to think of the precious child being so unselfish, and denying herself, and she with such a poor appetite too, and sending two of them to Monarch, and here am I spending my whole Sunday away from her, waiting for a chance to give them to the dog. I climbed the fence, and laid myself open to being took up, just to try and please the darling, for I couldn’t bear to go home and meet her sweet face when she says, “Daddy, have you given my cakes to Monarch?” and I having to say “No.”’

The man drew his ragged sleeve across his eyes.

‘It’s very hard, young master,’ he added in a broken voice, ‘that an honest man can’t go boldly up to the coachman’s door, and ask to see the dog, without being called names, and turned away as a beggar, just because he’s poor, and his coat isn’t as whole as it might be.’

‘I could manage to give the dog your little girl’s cakes,’ said Vivian eagerly. He was very kind-hearted, and, besides, he began to see a way of escape for himself. ‘I could give him the cakes, only you would have to promise’——

‘To promise not to tell about the window?’ interrupted the man, looking up with a gleam in his eye. ‘I would gladly promise you that, for, after all, it is none of my business. So we will make a bargain. If you will take these cakes, and give them to Monarch about the darkening, just when my little girl is having her supper—for it will please her to think that he is eating them then—I will go right away, and never tell a word about all I have seen this morning; no, not though I read about it in the papers. But you must give me your Bible oath as you will be true, and give them to the dog, and not guzzle them yourself.’

‘Oh, you may be sure that I won’t eat them,’ said Vivian hastily, shuddering at the mere thought of eating anything that had been in contact with the man’s dirty coat; ‘and I promise to give them to Monarch. I can easily run out at tea-time, and put them in his kennel.’

‘Say “I take my Bible oath not to eat them myself, and to give them to the dog at tea-time,”’ said the man sternly, ‘else I’ll stay here and tell the gentleman.’

Vivian hesitated. To say that he took his Bible oath seemed to him very much like swearing, and that would be to sink one step deeper into the mire of despair and wickedness into which he had already fallen.

Just then the clock on the Heath rang out the half-hour.

‘You’d better choose quick, for they’ll be coming home from church,’ said the man, who had no desire to be found in the grounds, and who yet wished to carry his point.

The warning had its due effect on Vivian. With trembling haste he stumbled over the hated words, and then, reaching out his hand for the two little cakes, he thrust them into his trousers-pocket, and turned and ran into the house, feeling dully that fate was all against him, while the man, with a satisfied smile on his face, swung himself up into the branches of the oak-tree, and after a careful survey of the Heath to see that there was no one in sight, let himself lightly on the path on the other side of the hedge, and walked quickly away.

All through dinner-time, and through the short winter afternoon that followed, Vivian waited in sickening anxiety for some one to come in with the news of the broken windows. He knew that they must soon be discovered, for the first person who walked round that way could not fail to notice them, and then he would be sure to be questioned, and he would need to tell lies to shield himself. Poor little boy! he was fast finding out how true the saying is, that ‘one lie needs six to cover it,’ and the hot tears came into his eyes as he thought of last Sunday’s talk with his mother, and of the many good resolutions he had made in church, ay, and which he had meant with all his heart to keep.

The discovery was not destined to be made that day, however. The summer-house stood right away from the stables and greenhouses, so that none of the men needed to go near it; and as the frost gave way again, as it had done on so many other days during the week, and an afternoon of heavy rain succeeded the brilliant sunshine of the morning, Aunt Dora did not insist on the children going out for their usual run, but sent them up into the schoolroom, where they spent the afternoon quietly with Sunday puzzles and story-books, so as not to disturb Isobel, who was still much more inclined to sleep than to talk.