evidence at an inquest, and the whole thing got into the papers.
Chips felt that he would rather enjoy that part, but he did not say so, and Jan still preserved a Delphic silence.
"Besides," added Devereux, returning rather suddenly to his original ground, "I'm blowed if I myself could swear I'd ever seen the body."
"You wouldn't," remarked Jan, sympathetically. "You didn't have a good enough look."
"Yet you saw enough to make you bolt," said that offensive Chips, and opened all the dampers of Evan's natural heat.
"It wasn't what I saw, my good fool!" he cried angrily. "You know as well as I do what it was like up there. That's the only reason I cleared out."
"Well, there you are!" said Jan, grinning aloft on his rail.
"Then you agree with Carpenter, do you, that it's our duty to go in and report the whole thing, and get a licking for our pains?"
Carpenter laughed satirically at the "licking," but refrained from speech. He knew of old that Evan's horror of the rod was on a par with the ordinary citizen's horror of gaol. And he could not help wanting Jan to know it—but Jan did.
Once, in the very oldest days, when the pretty boy and the stable brat were playing together for almost the first time, the boy had broken a window and begged the brat to father the crime! Jan would not have told Chips for worlds; indeed, he was very sorry to have recalled so dim an incident out of the dead past; but there it was, unbidden, and here was the same inveterate abhorrence, not so much of actual punishment, but of being put in an unfavourable light in the eyes of others. That was a
