CHAPTER TWO


"MRS. FLANDERS"--"Poor Betty Flanders"--"Dear Betty"--"She's very
attractive still"--"Odd she don't marry again!" "There's Captain Barfoot
to be sure--calls every Wednesday as regular as clockwork, and never
brings his wife."

"But that's Ellen Barfoot's fault," the ladies of Scarborough said. "She
don't put herself out for no one."

"A man likes to have a son--that we know."

"Some tumours have to be cut; but the sort my mother had you bear with
for years and years, and never even have a cup of tea brought up to you
in bed."

(Mrs. Barfoot was an invalid.)

Elizabeth Flanders, of whom this and much more than this had been said
and would be said, was, of course, a widow in her prime. She was half-
way between forty and fifty. Years and sorrow between them; the death of
Seabrook, her husband; three boys; poverty; a house on the outskirts of
Scarborough; her brother, poor Morty's, downfall and possible demise--
for where was he? what was he? Shading her eyes, she looked along the
road for Captain Barfoot--yes, there he was, punctual as ever; the
attentions of the Captain--all ripened Betty Flanders, enlarged her
figure, tinged her face with jollity, and flooded her eyes for no reason
that any one could see perhaps three times a day.

True, there's no harm in crying for one's husband, and the tombstone,
though plain, was a solid piece of work, and on summer's days when the
widow brought her boys to stand there one felt kindly towards her. Hats
were raised higher than usual; wives tugged their husbands' arms.
Seabrook lay six foot beneath, dead these many years; enclosed in three
shells; the crevices sealed with lead, so that, had earth and wood been
glass, doubtless his very face lay visible beneath, the face of a young
man whiskered, shapely, who had gone out duck-shooting and refused to
change his boots.

"Merchant of this city," the tombstone said; though why Betty Flanders
had chosen so to call him when, as many still remembered, he had only
sat behind an office window for three months, and before that had broken
horses, ridden to hounds, farmed a few fields, and run a little wild--
well, she had to call him something. An example for the boys.

Had he, then, been nothing? An unanswerable question, since even if it
weren't the habit of the undertaker to close the eyes, the light so soon
goes out of them. At first, part of herself; now one of a company, he
had merged in the grass, the sloping hillside, the thousand white
stones, some slanting, others upright, the decayed wreaths, the crosses
of green tin, the narrow yellow paths, and the lilacs that drooped in
April, with a scent like that of an invalid's bedroom, over the
churchyard wall. Seabrook was now all that; and when, with her skirt
hitched up, feeding the chickens, she heard the bell for service or
funeral, that was Seabrook's voice--the voice of the dead.

The rooster had been known to fly on her shoulder and peck her neck, so
that now she carried a stick or took one of the children with her when
she went to feed the fowls.

"Wouldn't you like my knife, mother?" said Archer.

Sounding at the same moment as the bell, her son's voice mixed life and
death inextricably, exhilaratingly.

"What a big knife for a small boy!" she said. She took it to please him.
Then the rooster flew out of the hen-house, and, shouting to Archer to
shut the door into the kitchen garden, Mrs. Flanders set her meal down,
clucked for the hens, went bustling about the orchard, and was seen from
over the way by Mrs. Cranch, who, beating her mat against the wall, held
it for a moment suspended while she observed to Mrs. Page next door that
Mrs. Flanders was in the orchard with the chickens.

Mrs. Page, Mrs. Cranch, and Mrs. Garfit could see Mrs. Flanders in the
orchard because the orchard was a piece of Dods Hill enclosed; and Dods
Hill dominated the village. No words can exaggerate the importance of
Dods Hill. It was the earth; the world against the sky; the horizon of
how many glances can best be computed by those who have lived all their
lives in the same village, only leaving it once to fight in the Crimea,
like old George Garfit, leaning over his garden gate smoking his pipe.
The progress of the sun was measured by it; the tint of the day laid
against it to be judged.

"Now she's going up the hill with little John," said Mrs. Cranch to Mrs.
Garfit, shaking her mat for the last time, and bustling indoors. Opening
the orchard gate, Mrs. Flanders walked to the top of Dods Hill, holding
John by the hand. Archer and Jacob ran in front or lagged behind; but
they were in the Roman fortress when she came there, and shouting out
what ships were to be seen in the bay. For there was a magnificent view
--moors behind, sea in front, and the whole of Scarborough from one end
to the other laid out flat like a puzzle. Mrs. Flanders, who was growing
stout, sat down in the fortress and looked about her.

The entire gamut of the view's changes should have been known to her;
its winter aspect, spring, summer and autumn; how storms came up from
the sea; how the moors shuddered and brightened as the clouds went over;
she should have noted the red spot where the villas were building; and
the criss-cross of lines where the allotments were cut; and the diamond
flash of little glass houses in the sun. Or, if details like these
escaped her, she might have let her fancy play upon the gold tint of the
sea at sunset, and thought how it lapped in coins of gold upon the
shingle. Little pleasure boats shoved out into it; the black arm of the
pier hoarded it up. The whole city was pink and gold; domed; mist-
wreathed; resonant; strident. Banjoes strummed; the parade smelt of tar
which stuck to the heels; goats suddenly cantered their carriages
through crowds. It was observed how well the Corporation had laid out
the flower-beds. Sometimes a straw hat was blown away. Tulips burnt in
the sun. Numbers of sponge-bag trousers were stretched in rows. Purple
bonnets fringed soft, pink, querulous faces on pillows in bath chairs.
Triangular hoardings were wheeled along by men in white coats. Captain
George Boase had caught a monster shark. One side of the triangular
hoarding said so in red, blue, and yellow letters; and each line ended
with three differently coloured notes of exclamation.

So that was a reason for going down into the Aquarium, where the sallow
blinds, the stale smell of spirits of salt, the bamboo chairs, the
tables with ash-trays, the revolving fish, the attendant knitting behind
six or seven chocolate boxes (often she was quite alone with the fish
for hours at a time) remained in the mind as part of the monster shark,
he himself being only a flabby yellow receptacle, like an empty
Gladstone bag in a tank. No one had ever been cheered by the Aquarium;
but the faces of those emerging quickly lost their dim, chilled
expression when they perceived that it was only by standing in a queue
that one could be admitted to the pier. Once through the turnstiles,
every one walked for a yard or two very briskly; some flagged at this
stall; others at that.

But it was the band that drew them all to it finally; even the fishermen
on the lower pier taking up their pitch within its range.

The band played in the Moorish kiosk. Number nine went up on the board.
It was a waltz tune. The pale girls, the old widow lady, the three Jews
lodging in the same boarding-house, the dandy, the major, the horse-
dealer, and the gentleman of independent means, all wore the same
blurred, drugged expression, and through the chinks in the planks at
their feet they could see the green summer waves, peacefully, amiably,
swaying round the iron pillars of the pier.

But there was a time when none of this had any existence (thought the
young man leaning against the railings). Fix your eyes upon the lady's
skirt; the grey one will do--above the pink silk stockings. It changes;
drapes her ankles--the nineties; then it amplifies--the seventies; now
it's burnished red and stretched above a crinoline--the sixties; a tiny
black foot wearing a white cotton stocking peeps out. Still sitting
there? Yes--she's still on the pier. The silk now is sprigged with
roses, but somehow one no longer sees so clearly. There's no pier
beneath us. The heavy chariot may swing along the turnpike road, but
there's no pier for it to stop at, and how grey and turbulent the sea is
in the seventeenth century! Let's to the museum. Cannon-balls; arrow-
heads; Roman glass and a forceps green with verdigris. The Rev. Jaspar
Floyd dug them up at his own expense early in the forties in the Roman
camp on Dods Hill--see the little ticket with the faded writing on it.

And now, what's the next thing to see in Scarborough?

Mrs. Flanders sat on the raised circle of the Roman camp, patching
Jacob's breeches; only looking up as she sucked the end of her cotton,
or when some insect dashed at her, boomed in her ear, and was gone.

John kept trotting up and slapping down in her lap grass or dead leaves
which he called "tea," and she arranged them methodically but absent-
mindedly, laying the flowery heads of the grasses together, thinking how
Archer had been awake again last night; the church clock was ten or
thirteen minutes fast; she wished she could buy Garfit's acre.

"That's an orchid leaf, Johnny. Look at the little brown spots. Come,
my dear. We must go home. Ar-cher! Ja-cob!"

"Ar-cher! Ja-cob!" Johnny piped after her, pivoting round on his heel,
and strewing the grass and leaves in his hands as if he were sowing
seed. Archer and Jacob jumped up from behind the mound where they had
been crouching with the intention of springing upon their mother
unexpectedly, and they all began to walk slowly home.

"Who is that?" said Mrs. Flanders, shading her eyes.

"That old man in the road?" said Archer, looking below.

"He's not an old man," said Mrs. Flanders. "He's--no, he's not--I
thought it was the Captain, but it's Mr. Floyd. Come along, boys."

"Oh, bother Mr. Floyd!" said Jacob, switching off a thistle's head, for
he knew already that Mr. Floyd was going to teach them Latin, as indeed
he did for three years in his spare time, out of kindness, for there was
no other gentleman in the neighbourhood whom Mrs. Flanders could have
asked to do such a thing, and the elder boys were getting beyond her,
and must be got ready for school, and it was more than most clergymen
would have done, coming round after tea, or having them in his own room
--as he could fit it in--for the parish was a very large one, and Mr.
Floyd, like his father before him, visited cottages miles away on the
moors, and, like old Mr. Floyd, was a great scholar, which made it so
unlikely--she had never dreamt of such a thing. Ought she to have
guessed? But let alone being a scholar he was eight years younger than
she was. She knew his mother--old Mrs. Floyd. She had tea there. And it
was that very evening when she came back from having tea with old Mrs.
Floyd that she found the note in the hall and took it into the kitchen
with her when she went to give Rebecca the fish, thinking it must be
something about the boys.

"Mr. Floyd brought it himself, did he?--I think the cheese must be in
the parcel in the hall--oh, in the hall--" for she was reading. No, it
was not about the boys.

"Yes, enough for fish-cakes to-morrow certainly--Perhaps Captain
Barfoot--" she had come to the word "love." She went into the garden and
read, leaning against the walnut tree to steady herself. Up and down
went her breast. Seabrook came so vividly before her. She shook her head
and was looking through her tears at the little shifting leaves against
the yellow sky when three geese, half-running, half-flying, scuttled
across the lawn with Johnny behind them, brandishing a stick.

Mrs. Flanders flushed with anger.

"How many times have I told you?" she cried, and seized him and snatched
his stick away from him.

"But they'd escaped!" he cried, struggling to get free.

"You're a very naughty boy. If I've told you once, I've told you a
thousand times. I won't have you chasing the geese!" she said, and
crumpling Mr. Floyd's letter in her hand, she held Johnny fast and
herded the geese back into the orchard.

"How could I think of marriage!" she said to herself bitterly, as she
fastened the gate with a piece of wire. She had always disliked red hair
in men, she thought, thinking of Mr. Floyd's appearance, that night when
the boys had gone to bed. And pushing her work-box away, she drew the
blotting-paper towards her, and read Mr. Floyd's letter again, and her
breast went up and down when she came to the word "love," but not so
fast this time, for she saw Johnny chasing the geese, and knew that it
was impossible for her to marry any one--let alone Mr. Floyd, who was so
much younger than she was, but what a nice man--and such a scholar too.

"Dear Mr. Floyd," she wrote.--"Did I forget about the cheese?" she
wondered, laying down her pen. No, she had told Rebecca that the cheese
was in the hall. "I am much surprised..." she wrote.

But the letter which Mr. Floyd found on the table when he got up early
next morning did not begin "I am much surprised," and it was such a
motherly, respectful, inconsequent, regretful letter that he kept it for
many years; long after his marriage with Miss Wimbush, of Andover; long
after he had left the village. For he asked for a parish in Sheffield,
which was given him; and, sending for Archer, Jacob, and John to say
good-bye, he told them to choose whatever they liked in his study to
remember him by. Archer chose a paper-knife, because he did not like to
choose anything too good; Jacob chose the works of Byron in one volume;
John, who was still too young to make a proper choice, chose Mr. Floyd's
kitten, which his brothers thought an absurd choice, but Mr. Floyd
upheld him when he said: "It has fur like you." Then Mr. Floyd spoke
about the King's Navy (to which Archer was going); and about Rugby (to
which Jacob was going); and next day he received a silver salver and
went--first to Sheffield, where he met Miss Wimbush, who was on a visit
to her uncle, then to Hackney--then to Maresfield House, of which he
became the principal, and finally, becoming editor of a well-known
series of Ecclesiastical Biographies, he retired to Hampstead with his
wife and daughter, and is often to be seen feeding the ducks on Leg of
Mutton Pond. As for Mrs. Flanders's letter--when he looked for it the
other day he could not find it, and did not like to ask his wife whether
she had put it away. Meeting Jacob in Piccadilly lately, he recognized
him after three seconds. But Jacob had grown such a fine young man that
Mr. Floyd did not like to stop him in the street.

"Dear me," said Mrs. Flanders, when she read in the Scarborough and
Harrogate Courier that the Rev. Andrew Floyd, etc., etc., had been made
Principal of Maresfield House, "that must be our Mr. Floyd."

A slight gloom fell upon the table. Jacob was helping himself to jam;
the postman was talking to Rebecca in the kitchen; there was a bee
humming at the yellow flower which nodded at the open window. They were
all alive, that is to say, while poor Mr. Floyd was becoming Principal
of Maresfield House.

Mrs. Flanders got up and went over to the fender and stroked Topaz on
the neck behind the ears.

"Poor Topaz," she said (for Mr. Floyd's kitten was now a very old cat, a
little mangy behind the ears, and one of these days would have to be
killed).

"Poor old Topaz," said Mrs. Flanders, as he stretched himself out in the
sun, and she smiled, thinking how she had had him gelded, and how she
did not like red hair in men. Smiling, she went into the kitchen.

Jacob drew rather a dirty pocket-handkerchief across his face. He went
upstairs to his room.

The stag-beetle dies slowly (it was John who collected the beetles).
Even on the second day its legs were supple. But the butterflies were
dead. A whiff of rotten eggs had vanquished the pale clouded yellows
which came pelting across the orchard and up Dods Hill and away on to
the moor, now lost behind a furze bush, then off again helter-skelter in
a broiling sun. A fritillary basked on a white stone in the Roman camp.
From the valley came the sound of church bells. They were all eating
roast beef in Scarborough; for it was Sunday when Jacob caught the pale
clouded yellows in the clover field, eight miles from home.

Rebecca had caught the death's-head moth in the kitchen.

A strong smell of camphor came from the butterfly boxes.

Mixed with the smell of camphor was the unmistakable smell of seaweed.
Tawny ribbons hung on the door. The sun beat straight upon them.

The upper wings of the moth which Jacob held were undoubtedly marked
with kidney-shaped spots of a fulvous hue. But there was no crescent
upon the underwing. The tree had fallen the night he caught it. There
had been a volley of pistol-shots suddenly in the depths of the wood.
And his mother had taken him for a burglar when he came home late. The
only one of her sons who never obeyed her, she said.

Morris called it "an extremely local insect found in damp or marshy
places." But Morris is sometimes wrong. Sometimes Jacob, choosing a very
fine pen, made a correction in the margin.

The tree had fallen, though it was a windless night, and the lantern,
stood upon the ground, had lit up the still green leaves and the dead
beech leaves. It was a dry place. A toad was there. And the red
underwing had circled round the light and flashed and gone. The red
underwing had never come back, though Jacob had waited. It was after
twelve when he crossed the lawn and saw his mother in the bright room,
playing patience, sitting up.

"How you frightened me!" she had cried. She thought something dreadful
had happened. And he woke Rebecca, who had to be up so early.

There he stood pale, come out of the depths of darkness, in the hot
room, blinking at the light.

No, it could not be a straw-bordered underwing.

The mowing-machine always wanted oiling. Barnet turned it under Jacob's
window, and it creaked--creaked, and rattled across the lawn and creaked
again.

Now it was clouding over.

Back came the sun, dazzlingly.

It fell like an eye upon the stirrups, and then suddenly and yet very
gently rested upon the bed, upon the alarum clock, and upon the
butterfly box stood open. The pale clouded yellows had pelted over the
moor; they had zigzagged across the purple clover. The fritillaries
flaunted along the hedgerows. The blues settled on little bones lying on
the turf with the sun beating on them, and the painted ladies and the
peacocks feasted upon bloody entrails dropped by a hawk. Miles away from
home, in a hollow among teasles beneath a ruin, he had found the commas.
He had seen a white admiral circling higher and higher round an oak
tree, but he had never caught it. An old cottage woman living alone,
high up, had told him of a purple butterfly which came every summer to
her garden. The fox cubs played in the gorse in the early morning, she
told him. And if you looked out at dawn you could always see two
badgers. Sometimes they knocked each other over like two boys fighting,
she said.

"You won't go far this afternoon, Jacob," said his mother, popping her
head in at the door, "for the Captain's coming to say good-bye." It was
the last day of the Easter holidays.

Wednesday was Captain Barfoot's day. He dressed himself very neatly in
blue serge, took his rubber-shod stick--for he was lame and wanted two
fingers on the left hand, having served his country--and set out from
the house with the flagstaff precisely at four o'clock in the afternoon.

At three Mr. Dickens, the bath-chair man, had called for Mrs. Barfoot.

"Move me," she would say to Mr. Dickens, after sitting on the esplanade
for fifteen minutes. And again, "That'll do, thank you, Mr. Dickens." At
the first command he would seek the sun; at the second he would stay the
chair there in the bright strip.

An old inhabitant himself, he had much in common with Mrs. Barfoot--
James Coppard's daughter. The drinking-fountain, where West Street joins
Broad Street, is the gift of James Coppard, who was mayor at the time of
Queen Victoria's jubilee, and Coppard is painted upon municipal
watering-carts and over shop windows, and upon the zinc blinds of
solicitors' consulting-room windows. But Ellen Barfoot never visited the
Aquarium (though she had known Captain Boase who had caught the shark
quite well), and when the men came by with the posters she eyed them
superciliously, for she knew that she would never see the Pierrots, or
the brothers Zeno, or Daisy Budd and her troupe of performing seals. For
Ellen Barfoot in her bath-chair on the esplanade was a prisoner--
civilization's prisoner--all the bars of her cage falling across the
esplanade on sunny days when the town hall, the drapery stores, the
swimming-bath, and the memorial hall striped the ground with shadow.

An old inhabitant himself, Mr. Dickens would stand a little behind her,
smoking his pipe. She would ask him questions--who people were--who now
kept Mr. Jones's shop--then about the season--and had Mrs. Dickens
tried, whatever it might be--the words issuing from her lips like crumbs
of dry biscuit.

She closed her eyes. Mr. Dickens took a turn. The feelings of a man had
not altogether deserted him, though as you saw him coming towards you,
you noticed how one knobbed black boot swung tremulously in front of the
other; how there was a shadow between his waistcoat and his trousers;
how he leant forward unsteadily, like an old horse who finds himself
suddenly out of the shafts drawing no cart. But as Mr. Dickens sucked in
the smoke and puffed it out again, the feelings of a man were
perceptible in his eyes. He was thinking how Captain Barfoot was now on
his way to Mount Pleasant; Captain Barfoot, his master. For at home in
the little sitting-room above the mews, with the canary in the window,
and the girls at the sewing-machine, and Mrs. Dickens huddled up with
the rheumatics--at home where he was made little of, the thought of
being in the employ of Captain Barfoot supported him. He liked to think
that while he chatted with Mrs. Barfoot on the front, he helped the
Captain on his way to Mrs. Flanders. He, a man, was in charge of Mrs.
Barfoot, a woman.

Turning, he saw that she was chatting with Mrs. Rogers. Turning again,
he saw that Mrs. Rogers had moved on. So he came back to the bath-chair,
and Mrs. Barfoot asked him the time, and he took out his great silver
watch and told her the time very obligingly, as if he knew a great deal
more about the time and everything than she did. But Mrs. Barfoot knew
that Captain Barfoot was on his way to Mrs. Flanders.

Indeed he was well on his way there, having left the tram, and seeing
Dods Hill to the south-east, green against a blue sky that was suffused
with dust colour on the horizon. He was marching up the hill. In spite
of his lameness there was something military in his approach. Mrs.
Jarvis, as she came out of the Rectory gate, saw him coming, and her
Newfoundland dog, Nero, slowly swept his tail from side to side.

"Oh, Captain Barfoot!" Mrs. Jarvis exclaimed.

"Good-day, Mrs. Jarvis," said the Captain.

They walked on together, and when they reached Mrs. Flanders's gate
Captain Barfoot took off his tweed cap, and said, bowing very
courteously:

"Good-day to you, Mrs. Jarvis."

And Mrs. Jarvis walked on alone.

She was going to walk on the moor. Had she again been pacing her lawn
late at night? Had she again tapped on the study window and cried: "Look
at the moon, look at the moon, Herbert!"

And Herbert looked at the moon.

Mrs. Jarvis walked on the moor when she was unhappy, going as far as a
certain saucer-shaped hollow, though she always meant to go to a more
distant ridge; and there she sat down, and took out the little book
hidden beneath her cloak and read a few lines of poetry, and looked
about her. She was not very unhappy, and, seeing that she was forty-
five, never perhaps would be very unhappy, desperately unhappy that is,
and leave her husband, and ruin a good man's career, as she sometimes
threatened.

Still there is no need to say what risks a clergyman's wife runs when
she walks on the moor. Short, dark, with kindling eyes, a pheasant's
feather in her hat, Mrs. Jarvis was just the sort of woman to lose her
faith upon the moors--to confound her God with the universal that is--
but she did not lose her faith, did not leave her husband, never read
her poem through, and went on walking the moors, looking at the moon
behind the elm trees, and feeling as she sat on the grass high above
Scarborough... Yes, yes, when the lark soars; when the sheep, moving a
step or two onwards, crop the turf, and at the same time set their bells
tinkling; when the breeze first blows, then dies down, leaving the cheek
kissed; when the ships on the sea below seem to cross each other and
pass on as if drawn by an invisible hand; when there are distant
concussions in the air and phantom horsemen galloping, ceasing; when the
horizon swims blue, green, emotional--then Mrs. Jarvis, heaving a sigh,
thinks to herself, "If only some one could give me... if I could give
some one...." But she does not know what she wants to give, nor who
could give it her.

"Mrs. Flanders stepped out only five minutes ago, Captain," said
Rebecca. Captain Barfoot sat him down in the arm-chair to wait. Resting
his elbows on the arms, putting one hand over the other, sticking his
lame leg straight out, and placing the stick with the rubber ferrule
beside it, he sat perfectly still. There was something rigid about him.
Did he think? Probably the same thoughts again and again. But were they
"nice" thoughts, interesting thoughts? He was a man with a temper;
tenacious, faithful. Women would have felt, "Here is law. Here is order.
Therefore we must cherish this man. He is on the Bridge at night," and,
handing him his cup, or whatever it might be, would run on to visions of
shipwreck and disaster, in which all the passengers come tumbling from
their cabins, and there is the captain, buttoned in his pea-jacket,
matched with the storm, vanquished by it but by none other. "Yet I have
a soul," Mrs. Jarvis would bethink her, as Captain Barfoot suddenly blew
his nose in a great red bandanna handkerchief, "and it's the man's
stupidity that's the cause of this, and the storm's my storm as well as
his"... so Mrs. Jarvis would bethink her when the Captain dropped in to
see them and found Herbert out, and spent two or three hours, almost
silent, sitting in the arm-chair. But Betty Flanders thought nothing of
the kind.

"Oh, Captain," said Mrs. Flanders, bursting into the drawing-room, "I
had to run after Barker's man... I hope Rebecca... I hope Jacob..."

She was very much out of breath, yet not at all upset, and as she put
down the hearth-brush which she had bought of the oil-man, she said it
was hot, flung the window further open, straightened a cover, picked up
a book, as if she were very confident, very fond of the Captain, and a
great many years younger than he was. Indeed, in her blue apron she did
not look more than thirty-five. He was well over fifty.

She moved her hands about the table; the Captain moved his head from
side to side, and made little sounds, as Betty went on chattering,
completely at his ease--after twenty years.

"Well," he said at length, "I've heard from Mr. Polegate."

He had heard from Mr. Polegate that he could advise nothing better than
to send a boy to one of the universities.

"Mr. Floyd was at Cambridge... no, at Oxford... well, at one or the
other," said Mrs. Flanders.

She looked out of the window. Little windows, and the lilac and green of
the garden were reflected in her eyes.

"Archer is doing very well," she said. "I have a very nice report from
Captain Maxwell."

"I will leave you the letter to show Jacob," said the Captain, putting
it clumsily back in its envelope.

"Jacob is after his butterflies as usual," said Mrs. Flanders irritably,
but was surprised by a sudden afterthought, "Cricket begins this week,
of course."

"Edward Jenkinson has handed in his resignation," said Captain Barfoot.

"Then you will stand for the Council?" Mrs. Flanders exclaimed, looking
the Captain full in the face.

"Well, about that," Captain Barfoot began, settling himself rather
deeper in his chair.

Jacob Flanders, therefore, went up to Cambridge in October, 1906.