He long remembered that tramp in the heat and dust. Throughout it he was weighed down by the feeling that he was an outcast, that people who met him looked strangely at him, that while he roamed aimlessly his duty called him home. Presently a new fear rose to vex his soul--that his father would not keep his word; the consequence of which was that half an hour before the train started he was lurking about the fir-plantation at the back of the station-house, peeping at the platform, which lay grilling in the sunshine, and tormenting himself with the suspicion that his watch was wrong.
Presently the station woke up. One or two people arrived, and took seats on a barrow in a shady place. The station-master labelled a hamper and gave out a ticket. Then some one who was by no means welcome to the vicar appeared--Jim Foley. He did not enter the station, but the vicar caught sight of him standing on the bridge which carried the road over the railway. What was more, Jim Foley at the same moment discovered the vicar.
Jim looked elsewhere, but he had his suspicions. "Hallo!" he muttered. "Friend Jones grows more of a riddle than ever. I suppose he has had dealings with Master Wilkins, and has an equal interest with me in seeing him off. I hope he has got rid of him as cheaply! But it is odd! I shall tell the Partridge, and hear what she says. She likes him."
He forgot his wife a few minutes later, when the train had steamed slowly in, and stood, and steamed out again, and the two people who had come by it had passed him, and even the vicar, slowly and perforce, had crawled up to him on the bridge. Foley by that time had found something else to consider. "I say," he exclaimed on the impulse of the moment, meeting the clergyman open-mouthed, "this won't do, you know."
Jones was dazed, struck down and prostrated by his disappointment. "What," he said feebly--"what won't do?"
"He has not gone!"
"No!"
"The old buffer! I guessed what was up when I saw you hanging about. Did he get anything out of you?"
The question sounded brutal, but the clergyman answered it. "Yes," he said, his cheek dark--and he looked down at the end of his stick and wondered how the other had found it out. "Two sovereigns."
"By Jove! Well, what is to be done now--that is the question?"