forgiven me. But I'm rather sorry for these beggars, for they came to me like flowers in May."And as his face darkened with a shame unseen all day in that doleful
dock, it was some comfort to me to feel that it had never been less like its debased image at Hampton Court.

CHAPTER VII
The Locked Room

It was no great coincidence that we should have been speaking of Edgar Nettleton that night. Uvo Delavoye was full of him just then, and I had the man on my mind for other reasons. Besides, I had to talk to Uvo about something, since he was down with a quinsy caught from the perfect sanitation in advertised vogue on the Estate, and could hardly open his own mouth. And perhaps I had to talk to somebody about the unpleasant duty hanging over me in connection with this fellow Nettleton, who had taken his house about the same time as Colonel Cheffins and his gang, had made up to Delavoye over that affair, and was himself almost as undesirable a tenant from my point of view.

"I know he's a friend of yours, and I haven't come to curse him to your face," I had been saying. "But if you would just tell Nettleton, when you see him again, that we're in dead earnest this time, you might be doing both him and us a service. I sent him a final demand yesterday; if he doesn't pay up within the week, my orders are to distrain without further notice. Muskett's furious about the whole thing. He blames me for ever having truck with such a fellow in the first instance. But when a man has been science beak in a public school--and such a school--it sounds good enough for Witching Hill, doesn't it? Who would have thought he'd had the sack?"

"They've got to do something pretty desperate first, I fancy," whispered Uvo, with a gleam in his sunken eyes. He had not denied the fact. I felt encouraged to elaborate my grievance against Edgar Nettleton.

"Besides, I had his banker's reference. That was all right; yet we had trouble to get our very first rent, more trouble over the second, and this time there's going to be a devil of a row. I shouldn't wonder if Nettleton had a bill of sale over every stick. I know he's owing all the tradesmen. He may be a very clever chap, and all that, but I can't help saying that he strikes me as a bit of a wrong 'un, Uvo."

Of course I had not started with the intention of saying quite so much. But the brunt of the unpleasantness was falling on my shoulders; and the fellow had made friends with my friend, whose shoes he was not fit to black. Uvo, moreover, was 

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