and he would bicycle over to the neighbouring town of Lexingham and start a banking account with it. Nobody would know, and life would go on as before.
He went to bed and slept peacefully.
It was about a week after this that he was roused out of a deep sleep at eight o'clock in the morning to find his room full of Coppins. Mr. Coppin was there in a nightshirt and his official trousers. Mrs. Coppin was there, weeping softly, in a brown dressing-gown. Modesty had apparently kept Muriel from the gathering, but brothers Frank and Percy stood at his bedside, shaking him by the shoulders and shouting. Mr. Coppin thrust a newspaper at him as he sat up, blinking.
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These epic moments are best related swiftly. Roland took the paper, and the first thing that met his sleepy eye and effectually drove the sleep from it was this headline:—
Romance of the Calcutta Sweepstake.
And beneath it another:—
Poor Clerk Wins £40,000.
His own name leaped at him from the printed page. And with it that of the faithful Gelatine.
Flight. That was the master-word which rang in Roland's brain as day followed day. The wild desire of the trapped animal to be anywhere except just where he was had come upon him. He was past the stage when conscience could have kept him to his obligations. He had ceased to think of anything or anyone but himself. All he asked of Fate was to remove him from Bury St. Edwards on any terms.
It may be that some inkling of his state of mind was wafted telepathically to Frank and Percy, for it cannot be denied that their behaviour at this juncture was more than a little reminiscent of the police force. Perhaps it was simply their natural anxiety to keep an eye on what they already considered their own private gold-min that made them so adhesive. Certainly there was no hour of the day when one or the other was not in Roland's immediate neighbourhood. Their vigilance even extended to the night hours, and once, when Roland, having tossed sleeplessly on his bed, got up at two in the morning, with the wild idea of stealing out of the house and walking to London, a door opened as he reached the top of the stairs, and a voice asked him what he thought he was doing. The statement that he was walking in his sleep was accepted, but coldly.
It was shortly after this that, having by dint of extraordinary strategy eluded the brothers and reached the railway station, Roland, with his ticket to London in his
