"You're cold, boy," said Martin. "Hev some a' th' doctor's stuff," and he handed a glass of the egg-flip to him. Geo drank it off, and wrung out his trousers.
"Can't we disperse the crowd now?" said Mr. Rutland to the constables; "I should like to get him away."
"Not yet awhile, sir," said the constable, with a knowing look. "They're taking round the hat for him, and he deserve it, that he do," he added emphatically. "Best leave 'em a few minutes, if you've no objection sir."
Mr. Rutland had no objection, but Geo himself had.
As a rule, Geo was, as we know, easy-going to a fault, and fell in too readily with anything and everything that his friends liked to suggest; but to his own surprise as much as that of any of the bystanders at these words, which he could not help overhearing, all his pride rose in revolt. His face flushed with sudden red, and his voice rang out with a loud and peremptory "Stop that!"
The men who were collecting turned and stared. They were not accustomed to refusals on occasions of this kind, and Geo's sudden bursting into notice astounded them.
"I take it very kind of you all," roared Geo, as if he had been accustomed to address a constituency, "but I'd rather you didn't give me nothin'. What I've done any on you would ha' done if I hain't a-been by, and I've liked myself wonderful all this last week, and I find I'm gettin' 'mazin' partial to work." (Cheers and laughter.) "Yes, you may laugh; there do 'pear a bit funny, I'll own, but that's the truth, and nothin' but the truth, and I—I—I mean to work like a good 'un!"
He ended rather lamely, but the crowd took up the cheers again, and, police or no police, half a dozen strong young fellows broke through the barrier, hoisted Geo on their shoulders, and carried him right away up the village to the tramp of many feet and the tune of "For he's a jolly good fellow," and nobody raised a protest even in the sacred cause of order.
Milly Greenacre stood at her garden gate as the stream went by; old Jimmy looked out of his bedroom window in his cotton night-cap, and cheered in his cracked old voice.
All his life long Geo will remember the dim outline of Milly's figure, white against the background of the lilac bushes, and the quaint, whimsical face of the old man peering into the darkness, and looking at him, for the first time of his life, with approval. It was only an instantaneous snapshot from the lanterns carried by some of the party that revealed the picture to him, but it was photographed for ever on his brain, and it was not one of the least among the pleasurable things Geo looked back to when all the excitement was over, and he had settled down to steady work as he said he would.