The railroad ran under the suspension-bridge. Patsy could see the station not an eighth of a mile down the track, and she made for it as being the nearest possible point where water might be procured. The station-master gave her a tin can and filled it for her; and ten minutes later she set about scrubbing the tinker free of all the telltale make-up of melodrama. It was accomplished—after a fashion, and with persistent rebelling on the tinker’s part and scolding on Patsy’s. And, finally, to prove his own supreme indifference to physical disablement, he tore the can from her administering hands, threw it over the bridge, and started down the road at his old, swinging stride.

“Is it after more lady’s-slippers ye’re dandering?” called Patsy.

“More likely it’s after a pair of those wingÈd shoes of Perseus; I’ll need them.” But his stride soon broke to a walk and then to a lagging limp. “It’s no use,” he said at last; “I might keep on for another half-mile, a mile at the most; but that’s about all I’d be good for. You’ll have to go on to Arden alone, and you can’t miss it this time.”

Patsy stopped abruptly. “Why don’t ye curse me for the trouble I have brought?” She considered both hands carefully for a minute, as if she expected to find in them the solution to the difficulty, then she looked up and away toward the rising woodland that marked Arden.

“Do ye know,” she said, wistfully, “I took the road, thinking I could mend trouble for that other lad; and instead it’s trouble I’ve been making for every one—ye, Joseph, and I don’t know how many more. And instead of doling kindness—why, I’m begging it. Now what’s the meaning of it all? What keeps me failing?”

“‘There’s a divinity that shapes’—” began the tinker.

But Patsy cut him short. “Ye do know Willie Shakespeare!”

He smiled, guiltily. “I’m afraid I do—known him a good many years.”

“He’s grand company; best I know, barring tinkers.” She turned impulsively and, standing on tiptoe, her fingers reached to the top of his shoulders. “See here, lad, ye can just give over thinking I’ll go on alone. If I’m cast for melodrama, sure I’ll play it according to the best rules; the villain has fled, the hero is hurt, and if I went now I’d be hissed by the gallery. I’ve got ye into trouble and I’ll not leave ye till I see ye out of it—someway. Oh, there’s lots of ways; I’m thinking them fast. Like as not a passing team or car would carry ye to Arden; or we might beg the loan of a horse for a bit from some kind-hearted farmer, and I could drive ye over and bring the horse back; or we’ll ask a corner for ye at a farm-house till ye are fit to walk—”

“We are in the wrong part of the country for any of those things to happen. Look about! Don’t you see what a very different road it is from the one we took in the beginning?”

Patsy looked and saw. So engrossed had she been in the incidents of the last hour or more that she had not observed the changing country. Here were no longer pastures, tilled fields, houses with neighboring barn-yards, and unclaimed woodland; no longer was the road fringed with stone walls or stump fencing. Well-rolled golf-links stretched away on either hand as far as they could see; and, beyond, through the trees, showed roofs of red tile and stained shingle; and trimmed hedges skirted everything.

“’Tis the rich man’s country,” commented Patsy.

“It is, and I’d crawl into a hole and starve before I’d take charity from one of them.”

“Sure and ye would. When a body’s poor ’tis only the poor like himself he’d be asking help of. Don’t I know! What’s yonder house?” She broke off with a jerk and pointed ahead to a small building, sitting well back from the road, partly hidden in the surrounding clumps of trees.

“It’s a stable; house burned down last year and it hasn’t been used by any one since.”

“And I’ll wager it’s as snug as a pocket inside—with fresh hay or straw, plenty to make a lad comfortable. Isn’t that grand good luck for ye?”

The tinker found it hard to echo Patsy’s enthusiasm, but he did his best. “Of course; and it’s just the place to leave a lad behind in when a lass has seven miles to tramp before she gets to the end of her journey.”

“Is that so?” Patsy’s tone sounded suspiciously sarcastic. “Well, talking’s not walking; supposing ye take the staff in one hand and lean your other on me, and we’ll see can we make it before this time to-morrow.”

They made it in another hour, unobserved by the few straggling players on the links.

The stable proved all Patsy had anticipated. She watched the tinker sink, exhausted, on the bedded hay, while she pulled down a forgotten horse-blanket from a near-by peg to throw over him; then she turned in a business-like manner back to the door.

“Are you going to Arden?” came the faint voice of the tinker after her.

“I might—and then again—I mightn’t. Was there any word ye might want me to fetch ahead for ye?”

“No; only—perhaps—would you think a chap too everlastingly impertinent to ask you to wait there for him—until he caught up with you?”

“I might—and then again—I mightn’t.” At the door she stopped, and for the second time considered her hands speculatively. “It wouldn’t inconvenience your feelings any to take charity from me, would it, seeing I’m as poor as yourself and have dragged ye into this common, tuppenny brawl by my own foolishness?”

“You didn’t drag me in; I had one foot in already.”

“I thought so,” Patsy nodded, approvingly; her conviction had been correct, then. “And the charity?”

“Yes, I’d take it from you.” The tinker rolled over with a little moan composed of physical pain and mental discomfort. But in another moment he was sitting upright, shaking a mandatory fist at Patsy as she disappeared through the door. “Remember—no help from the quality! I hate them as much as you do, and I won’t have them coming around with their inquisitive, patronizing, supercilious offers of assistance to a—beggar. I tell you I want to be left alone! If you bring any one back with you I’ll burn the stable down about me. Remember!”

“Aye,” she called back; “I’ll be remembering.”

She reached the road again; and for the manyeth time since she left the women’s free ward of the City Hospital she marshaled all the O’Connell wits. But even the best of wits require opportunity, and to Patsy the immediate outlook seemed barren of such.

“There’s naught to do but keep going till something turns up,” she said to herself; and she followed this Micawber advice to the letter. She came to the end of the grounds which had belonged to the burned house and the deserted stable; she passed on, between a stretch of thin woodland and a grove of giant pines; and there she came upon a cross-road. She looked to the right—it was empty. She looked to the left—and behold there was “Opportunity,” large, florid, and agitated, coming directly toward her from one of the tile-roofed houses, and puffing audibly under the combined weight of herself and her bag.

“Ze depÔt—how long ees eet?” she demanded, when she caught sight of Patsy.

The accent was unmistakably French, and Patsy obligingly answered her in her mother-tongue. “I cannot say exactly; about three—four kilometers.”

“Opportunity” dropped her bag and embraced her. “Oh!” she burst out, volubly. “Think of ZoË Marat finding a countrywoman in this wild land. Moi—I can no longer stand it; and when madame’s temper goes pouffe—I say, it is enough; let madame fast or cook for her guests, as she prefer. I go!”

“Eh, bien!” agreed the outer Patsy, while her subjective consciousness addressed her objective self in plain Donegal: “Faith! this is the maddest luck—the maddest, merriest luck! If yonder Quality House has lost one cook, ’twill be needing another; and ’tis a poor cook entirely that doesn’t hold the keys of her own pantry. Food from Quality House needn’t be choking the maddest tinker, if it’s paid for in honest work.”

Having been embraced by “Opportunity,” Patsy saw no reason for wasting time in futile sympathy that might better be spent in prompt execution. She despatched the woman to the station with the briefest of directions and herself made straight for Quality House.

She was smiling over her appearance and the incongruities of the situation as she rang the bell at the front door and asked for “Madame” in her best parisien.

The maid, properly impressed, carried the message at once; and curiosity brought madame in surprising haste to the hall, where she looked Patsy over with frank amazement.

“Madame speak French? Ah, I thought so. Madame desires a cook—voilÀ!”

The abruptness of this announcement turned madame giddy. “How did you know? Mine did not leave half an hour ago; there isn’t another French cook within five miles; it is unbelievable.”

“It is Providence.” Patsy cast her eyes devoutly heavenward.

“You have references—”

“References!” Patsy shrugged her shoulders contemptuously. “What would madame do with references? She cannot eat them; she cannot feed them to her guests. I can cook. Is that not sufficient?”

“But—you do not think—It is impossible that I ever employ a servant without references. And you—you look like anything in the world but a French cook.”

“Madame is not so foolish as to find fault with the ways of Providence, or judge one by one’s clothes? Who knows—at this moment it may be À la mode in Paris for cooks to wear sailor blouses. Besides, madame is mistaken; I am not a servant. I am an artist—a culinary artist.”

“You can cook, truly?”

“But yes, madame!”

“Excellent sauces?”

“Mon Dieu—BÉchamel—Hollandaise—chaud-froid—maÎtre d’hÔtel—Espagnole—BÉarnaise—” Patsy completed the list with an ecstatic kiss blown into the air.

Madame sighed and spoke in English: “It is unbelievable—absurd. I shouldn’t trust my own eyes or palate if I sat down to-night to the most remarkable dinner in the world; but one must feed one’s guests.” She looked Patsy over again. “Your trunk?”

“Trunk? Is it toilettes or sauces madame wishes me to make for her guests? Ma foi! Trunks—references—one is as unimportant as the other. Is it not enough for the present if I cook for madame? Afterward—” She ended with the all-expressive shrug.

Evidently madame conceded the point, for without further comment she led the way to the kitchen and presented the bill of fare for dinner.

“‘For twelve,’” read Patsy. “And to-morrow is Sunday. Ah, Providence is good to madame, mais-oui?”

But madame’s thoughts were on more practical matters. “Your wages?”

“One hundred francs a week, and the kitchen to myself. I, too, have a temper, madame.” Patsy gave a quick toss to her head, while her eyes snapped.

That night the week-end guests at Quality House sat over their coffee, volubly commenting on the rare excellence of their dinner and the good fortune of their hostess in her possession of such a cook. Madame kept her own counsel and blessed Providence; but she did not allow that good fortune to escape with her better judgment—or anything else. She ordered the butler, before retiring, to count the silver and lock it in her dressing-room; this was to be done every night—as long as the new cook remained.

And the new cook? Her work despatched, and her kitchen to herself, she was free to get dinner for one more of madame’s guests.

“Faith! he’d die of a black fit if he ever knew he was a guest of Quality House—and she’d die of another if she found out whom she was entertaining. But, glory be to Peter! what neither of them knows won’t hurt them.” And Patsy, unobserved, opened the back door and retraced the road to the deserted stable with a full basket and a glad heart.

She found the tinker under some trees at the back, smoking a disreputable cuddy pipe with a worse accompaniment of tobacco. When he saw her he removed it apologetically.

“It smells horrible, I know. I found it, forgotten, on a ledge of the stable, but it keeps a chap from remembering that he is hungry.”

“Poor lad!” Patsy knelt on the ground beside him and opened her basket. “Put your nose into that, just. ’Tis a nine-course dinner and every bit of the best. Faith! ’tis lucky I was found on a Brittany rose-bush instead of one in Heidelberg, Birmingham, or Philadelphia; and if ye can’t be born with gold in your mouth the next best thing is a mixing-spoon.”

“Meaning?” queried the tinker.

“Meaning—that there’s many a poor soul who goes hungry through life because she is wanting the knowledge of how to mix what’s already under her nose.”

The tinker looked suspiciously from the contents of the basket to Patsy, kneeling beside it, and he dropped into a shameless mimicry of her brogue. “Aye, but how did she come by—what’s under her nose? Here’s a dinner for a king’s son.”

“Well, I’ll be letting ye play the king’s son instead of the fool to-night, just, if ye’ll give over asking any more questions and eat.”

“But”—he sniffed the plate she had handed him with added suspicion—“roast duck and sherry sauce! Honest, now—have ye been begging?”

“No—nor stealing—nor, by the same token, have I murdered any one to get the dinner from him.” There was fine sarcasm in her voice as she returned the tinker’s searching look.

“Then where did it come from? I’ll not eat a mouthful until I get an honest answer.” The tinker put the plate down beside him and folded his arms.

Patsy snorted with exasperation. “Was I ever saying ye could play the king’s son? Faith! ye’ll never play anything but the fool—first and last.” Her voice suddenly took on a more coaxing tone; she was thinking of that good dinner growing cold—spoiled by the man’s ridiculous curiosity. “I’ll tell ye what—if ye’ll agree to begin eating, I’ll agree to begin telling ye about it—and we’ll both agree not to stop till we get to the end. But Holy Saint Martin! who ever heard of a man before letting his conscience in ahead of his hunger!”

The bargain was made; and while the tinker devoured one plateful after another with a ravenous haste that almost discredited his previous restraint, Patsy spun a fanciful tale of having found a cluricaun under a quicken-tree. With great elaboration and seeming regard for the truth, she explained his magical qualities, and how—if you were clever enough to possess yourself of his cap—you could get almost anything from him.

“I held his cap firmly with the one hand and him by the scruff of the neck with the other; and says I to him, ‘Little man, ye’ll not be getting this back till ye’ve fetched me a dinner fit for a tinker.’ ‘Well, and good,’ says he, ‘but ye can’t find that this side of the King’s Hotel, Dublin; and that will take time.’ ‘Take the time,’ says I, ‘but get the dinner.’ And from that minute till the present I’ve been waiting under that quicken-tree for him to make the trip there and back.”

Patsy finished, and the two of them smiled at each other with rare good humor out under the June stars. Only the tinker’s smile was skeptical.

“So—ye are not believing me—” Patsy shammed a solemn, grieved look. “Well—I’ll forgive ye this time if ye’ll agree that the dinner was good, for I’d hate like the devil to be giving the wee man back his cap for anything but the best.”

With laggard grace the tinker stretched his hands over the now empty basket and gripped Patsy’s. “Lass, lass—what are you thinking of me? Faith! my manners are more ragged than my clothes—and I’m not fit to be a—tinker. The dinner was the best I ever ate, and—bless ye and the cluricaun!”

Patsy cooked for three days at Quality House, that the tinker might feast night and morning to his heart’s content while his ankle slowly mended. But he still persisted questioning concerning his food—where and how Patsy had come by it; she still maintained as persistent a silence.

“I’ve come by it honestly, and ’tis no charity fare,” was the most she would say, adding by way of flavor: “For a sorry tinker ye are the proudest I ever saw. Did ye ever know another, now, who wanted a written certificate of moral character along with every morsel he ate?”

According to wage agreement she had the kitchen to herself; no one entered except on matters of necessity; no one lingered after her work was despatched. Madame came twice daily to confer with Patsy on intricacies of gestation, while she beamed upon her as a probationed soul might look upon the keeper of the keys of Paradise. But the days held more for Patsy than sauces and entrÉes and pastries; they held gossip as well. SoupÇons were served up on loosened tongues, borne in through open window and swinging door—straight from the dining-room and my lady’s chamber. Most of it passed her ears, unheeded; it was but a droning accompaniment to her measuring, mixing, rolling, and baking—until news came at last that concerned herself—gossip of the Burgemans, father and son.

The butler and the parlor maid were cleaning the silver in the pantry—and the slide was raised. As transmitters of gossip they were more than usually concerned, for had not the butler at one time served in the house of Burgeman, and the maid dusted next door? Therefore every item of news was well ripened before it dropped from either tongue, and Patsy gathered them in with eager ears.

The master of Quality House happened to be a director of that bank on which the Burgeman check of ten thousand had been drawn. It had been the largest check drawn to cash presented at the bank; and the teller had confessed to the directors that he would never have paid over the money to any one except the old man’s son. In fact, he had been so much concerned over it afterward that he had called up the Burgeman office, and had been much relieved to have the assurance of the secretary that the check was certified and perfectly correct. Not a second thought would have been given to the matter had not the secretary’s resignation been made public the next day—the day Billy Burgeman disappeared.

Patsy’s ears fairly bristled with interest. “That’s news, if it is gossip. Where is the secretary now? And which of them has the ten thousand?”

The director had touched on the subject of the check the next day when business had demanded his presence at the Burgeman home. The result had been distinctly baffling. Not that the director could put his finger on any one suspicious point in the behavior of Burgeman, senior; but it left him with the distinct impression that the father was shielding the son.

“Aye, that’s what Billy said his father would do—shield him out of pride.” Patsy dusted the flour from her arms and stood motionless, thinking.

Burgeman, senior, had offered only one remark to the director, given cynically with a nervous jerking of the shoulders and twitching of the hands: “He was needing pocket-money, a small sum to keep him in shoe-laces and collar-buttons, I dare say. That’s the way rich men’s sons keep their fathers’ incomes from getting too cumbersome.”

Burgeman, senior, had been ill then—confined to his room; but the next day his condition had become alarming. He was now dying at his home in Arden and his son could not be found. These last two statements were not merely gossip, but facts.

Patsy listened impatiently to the parlor maid arguing the matter of Billy’s guilt with the butler. Their work was finished, and they were passing through the kitchen on their way to the servants’ hall.

“Of course he took it”—the maid’s tone was positive—“those rich men’s sons always are a bad lot.”

“’E didn’t take it, then. ’Is father’s playin’ some mean game on ’im—that’s what. Hi worked five months hin that ’ouse an’ Hi’d as lief work for the devil!” And the butler pounded his fist for emphasis.

It took all Patsy’s self-control to refrain from launching into the argument herself, and that in the Irish tongue. She saved herself, however, by resorting to that temper of which she had boasted, and hurled at the two a torrent of words which sounded to them like the most horrible pagan blasphemy, and from which they fled in genuine horror. In reality it was the names of all the places in France that Patsy could recall with rapidity.

When the kitchen was empty once more Patsy systematically gathered together all that she knew and all that she had heard of Billy Burgeman, and weighed it against the bare possible chance she might have of helping him should she continue her quest. And in the end she made her decision unwaveringly.

“Troth! a conscience is a poor bit of property entirely,” she sighed, as she stood the pÂtÉ-shells on the ledge of the range to dry. “It drives ye after a man ye don’t care a ha’penny about, and it drives ye from the one that ye do. Bad luck to it!”

That night Patsy sat under the trees with the tinker while he ate his supper. A half-grown moon lighted the feast for them, for Patsy took an occasional mouthful at the tinker’s insistence that dining alone was a miserably unsociable affair.

“To watch ye eat that pÂtÉ de fois gras a body would think ye had been reared on them. Honest, now, have ye ever tasted one before in your life?”

“I have.”

“Then—ye have sat at rich men’s tables?”

“Or perhaps I have begged at rich men’s doors. Maybe that is how I came to have a distaste for their—charity.”

“Who are ye? Ye know I’d give the full of my empty pockets to know who ye are, and what started ye tramping the road—in rags.”

The tinker considered a moment. “Perhaps I took the road because I believed it led to the only place I cared to find. Perhaps I lost the way to it, as you lost yours to Arden, and in the losing I found—something else. Perhaps—perhaps—oh, perhaps a hundred things; but I’ll make another bargain with you. I’ll tell you all about it when we reach Arden, if you’ll tell me the name of the lad you came to find.”

“I’ll do more than that—I’ll bring ye together and let ye help mend him,” and she stretched forth her hand to clinch the bargain.

They sat in silence under the spattering of moonlight that sifted down through the branches; for the moment the tinker had forgotten his hunger.

“Well?” queried Patsy at last. “A ha’penny for them.”

“I’m thinking the same old thoughts I’ve thought a hundred times already—since that first day: What makes you so different from everybody else? What ever sent you out into the world with your gospel of kindness—on your lips and in your hands?”

“Would ye really like to know?” Patsy’s fingers stole through the grass about them. “Faith! the world’s not so soft and green as this under every one’s feet. Ye see ’twas by a thorn I was found hanging to that Killarney rose-bush in Brittany, and I’ve always remembered the feeling of it.”

“I always suspected that the people who fell heir to stinging memories generally went through life hugging their own troubles, and letting the rest of the world hug theirs.”

“I don’t believe it!” Patsy shook her head fiercely. “What’s the use of all the pain and sorrow and trouble scattered about everywhere if it can’t put a cure for others into the hands of those who have first tasted it? And what better cure can ye find than kindness; isn’t it the best thing in the world?”

“Is it? Can it cure—gold?”

“And why not? If every man had more kindness than he had gold, would neighbor ever have to fear neighbor or childther go hungry for love?” The tinker did not answer, and Patsy went on with a deepening intensity: “I’ll tell ye a tale—a foolish tale that keeps repeating itself over and over in my memory like the tick-tick-tick of a clock. Ye know that the Jesuit Fathers say—give them the care of a child till he’s ten and nothing afterward matters. Well, it’s true; a child can feel all the sweetness or bitterness, hunger or plenty, that life holds before he is that age even.”

Patsy stopped. A veery was singing in the woods close by, and she listened for a moment. “Hearken to that bird, now. A good-for-naught lad may have stolen his nest, or a cat filched his young, or his sons and daughters flown away and left him; but he’ll sing, for all that. ’Tis a pity the rest of us can’t do as well.”

“Yes,” agreed the tinker, “but the story—”

“Aye, the story. It begins with a wee white cottage in Brittany, fronted by roses and backed by great cliffs and the open sea.” Patsy clasped her hands about her knees, while her eyes left the shadow of the trees and traveled to the open where the moonlight spread silvery clear and unbroken. And the tinker, watching, knew that her eyes were seeing the things of which she was telling. “A wee white cottage—the roses and the cliffs,” repeated Patsy, “and a great, grim, silent figure of a man sitting there idle all day, watching a little lass at her play. Just the man and the child. And the trouble in his mind that had kept the man silent and idle was an old, old trouble—old as the peopled world itself.

“Long before, he had married a woman who cared for two things—love and gold; and he had but the one to give her. She had been a great actress, a favorite at the ComÉdie FranÇaise; but she left her work and all the applause and adulation for him, an expatriated Irishman with naught but a great love, because she thought she cared for love more. They had been wonderfully happy at first; he wrote beautiful verses about her—and his beloved motherland, and she said them for him in that wonderful singing voice of hers that had made her the idol of half of France. And she had made a game of their poverty in the wee white cottage with the roses—until her child was born and poverty could no longer be played at. Then work became drudgery, and love naught. The woman went back to her theater—and another man, a man who had gold a-plenty. And the child grew up playing alone beside the silent, grim Irishman.

“Then one day the child played with no one by to watch her; the man had walked over the cliff and forgot ever to come back. Aye, and the child played on till dark came and she fell asleep—there on the door-sill, under the roses. ’Twas a neighbor, passing, that found her, and carried her home to put to bed with her own children. After that the child was taken away to a convent, and the rich children called her ‘la pauvre petite,’ shared their saints’-days’ gifts with her, and bought her candles that she might make a novena to bring her father back again. But ’twas her mother it brought instead.”

Patsy stopped again to listen to the veery; he was not singing alone now, and she smiled wistfully. “See! he’s found a friend, a comrade to sing with him. That’s grand!” Then she went back to the story:

“The child was taken from the convent in the night and by somber-clad servants who seemed in a great hurry. She was brought a long way to a chÂteau, one of the oldest and most beautiful in the south of France; and a small, shrivel-faced man in royal clothes met her at the door and carried her up great marble stairs to a chamber lighted by two tall candles, just. They stopped on the threshold for a breath, and the child saw that a woman was lying in the canopied bed—a very, very beautiful woman. To the child she seemed some goddess—or saint.

“‘Here is the child,’ said the man; and the woman answered: ‘Alone, RÉnÉ. Remember you promised—alone.’

“After that the man left them together—the dying woman and her child. Ah!—how can I be telling you the way she fondled and caressed her! How starved were the lips that touched the child’s hair, cheeks, and eyelids! And when her strength failed she drew the child into her tired arms and whispered fragments of prayers, haunting memories, pitiful regrets. Of all the things she said the child remembered but one: ‘Gold buys plenty for the body, but nothing for the heart—nothing—nothing!’

“And that kept repeating itself over and over in the child’s mind. She remembered it all through the night after they had taken her away from those lifeless arms and she lay awake alone in a terrifying, dark room; she remembered it all through the long day when she sat beside the gorgeous catafalque that held her mother, and watched the tall candles in the dim chapel burn lower and lower and lower. And that was why she refused to stay afterward—and be taken care of by the shrivel-faced man in that oldest and most beautiful chÂteau. Instead she slipped out early one morning, before any one was awake to see and mark the way she went. It is unbelievable, sometimes, how children who have the will to do it can lose themselves. And so this child—alone—went out into the world, empty-handed, seeking life.”

“But did she go empty-handed?” asked the tinker.

“Aye, but not empty-hearted, thank God!”

“And wherever the child went, she carried with her that hatred of gold,” mused the tinker.

“Aye; why not? She had learned how pitifully little it was worth, when all’s said and done. ’Twas her father’s name she heard last on her mother’s lips, and it was their child she prayed for with her dying breath.” Patsy sprang to her feet. “Do ye see—the moon will be beating me to bed, and ’twas a poor tale, after all. How is your foot?”

“Better—much better.”

“Would ye be able to travel on it to-morrow?”

The tinker shook his head. “The day after, perhaps.”

“Well, keep on coaxing it. Good night.” And she had picked up her basket and was gone before the tinker could stumble to his feet.

When the tinker woke the next morning the basket stood just inside the stable door, linked through the pilgrim’s staff. On investigation it proved to contain his breakfast and an envelope, and the envelope contained a ten-dollar bill and a letter, which read:

Surprise, disappointment, indignation, amusement, all battled for the upper hand; but it was a very different emotion from any of these which finally mastered the tinker. He smoothed the bill very tenderly between his hands before he returned it to the envelope; but he did something more than smooth the envelope.

And meanwhile Patsy tramped the road to Arden.