This, or else a tactful absenteeism, became their custom whenever licencing matters came up to be discussed.
But cases of conscience are cases of conscience all the world over.
The sum that Edward Garden proposed as a fair price for that catchment-area up Delyn was two hundred thousand pounds—this for about two thousand acres; and on the day when his lawyers named the figure it was a wonder that the whole Council did not take in a body to their beds. Two hundred thousand pounds! They could not believe their ears. Nor could they believe their eyes either when they got it in writing, words first, and the figures in brackets afterwards. If they had written the single word "Fancy!" across that document and sent it straightway back to the lawyers they would no doubt have followed their first impulse; but somebody, less hard hit in the wind than the rest, managed to gasp out the proposal that they should sleep on it, and sleep on it they did. But the night did not alter it. In the morning it was still two hundred thousand pounds (£200,000).
News of the rapacity of the demand had leaked out almost immediately. Ordinarily, anybody who had stopped Howell Gruffydd in the street and had asked him a Council secret would have been met with the smiling facer he deserved, but this was extraordinary altogether. On the morning after they had slept on it, William Morgan saw Howell on the Promenade, came up to him, and, making no bones about it whatever, asked him whether it was true.
"Who told you, William Morgan?" Howell began ... but he really had not the heart to go on. He took off his hat, wiped the lining of it with his handkerchief, and the bright sunlight showed his brows lined with anxiety and sick fear, crumpled and embossed like one of his own pats of butter. He replaced his hat and blew his nose violently.
"Is it true?" demanded William Morgan again.
Howell became grim.—"It was an e-vil day for this town when that man came here," he said, forgetting how little town there had been when that old brown horse had first brought the Gardens softly jolting across the sandhills.
"Then it is true?" said William Morgan once again.
"It is true that a man sometimes asks one thing, and finiss by getting something very diff-ferent from what he ask," Howell replied, and walked abruptly away.
He crossed the Promenade and turned into Pontnewydd Street. There he stood, irresolutely plucking his lip and gazing into a stationer's window. Dafydd Dafis's voice in his ear caused him to start almost violently.