Sunning himself proudly down the village street, the lad had been greeted with a howl of "Marbles!" by the ribald companions he thought to impress.
"Marbles! They're buttons, yer silly toads!" the indignant Egbert had cried.
"Wot O! Marbles!" they jeered, and two of the round silver buttons were wrenched off in the distressing affair that followed.
Egbert carried them home in his pocket. The incident augmented the hostile and suspicious air with which, from his childhood upwards, he regarded the world. For this attitude the accident attending his birth was primarily responsible. When he presented this morose disposition to his mother's friends, Mrs. Hunt, in her softer moods, would instruct them that his sourness—as she termed it—was due to the sudden and unexpected discharge of a cannon during her visit to a circus, when Egbert was but eight months on the road to this vale of tears. The cannon had hastened his arrival (she never knew, so she said, how she managed to get home) and the abruptness, she was convinced, was responsible for his glum demeanor. By a dark process of reasoning, wherein were combined retribution to the clown who had fired the cannon and recompense to the child it had unduly impelled into the world, she had named the boy Egbert, this being the title by which the clown was announced on the circus programme.
The story became a popular joke against the lad; to shout "Bang!" at Egbert from behind concealment became a favourite sport of his grosser companions. It rankled him sorely. For one so young he was unnaturally embittered; his digestion, moreover, was defective.
III
Upon the evening of the day on which his employers, Mr. and Mrs. Letham, had been miraculously elevated to the style and title of Lord and Lady Burdon, Egbert's hostility towards the world was at its height. From half-past three onwards, callers followed one another, or passed one another, over the Hillside threshold. Egbert was bone-tired. It was close upon seven when kindly Mrs. Archer, the doctor's wife, addressing him as he showed her out, inquired in her gentle way after his mother and passed down the path with a "Well, good night, Egbert!"
"Good night, mum," Egbert muttered. He added in a lower but more devout key, "An' I yope ter Gawd yer the last of um."
The cool air invited him to the gate and he leaned wearily over it, his bitterness of spirit increased by a boy who, spying him, cried, "Bang!" as he passed, "Bang!" in retort to Egbert's tongue thrust out in hatred and contempt across the gate, and "Bang! bang!" again, as the gathering evening took him in her trailing cloak.
Egbert drew in his tongue with a groan of misery and hate, of indigestion and of weariness. An approaching footstep along the road caused him to thrust it out again and to keep it extended, armed lest the newcomer should be one of the bangers who irked his young life.