Harry Noke was both tough and in his fashion gentle. As a young man he had been more ready to take hard knocks than to give them, and in the matter of love he had always been indolent and easy rather than voracious. Whatever came his road, whether a fine day or a willing woman, he took and rejoiced in, and thought no worse of himself for it. Indeed it was not his habit to think badly of himself. People liked him, and on the whole he agreed with them, in so far as he thought of the matter at all. Resourceful and vain and energetic, he was also generous and thoughtless and very ready to let the morrow take care of itself. But the morrow would not, it seemed, take care of two pregnant young women without his help; and Marden Fee, as we have seen, was not slow to express its dissent from his too sanguine philosophy of life. This dissent found a various and a forcible expression. Threats, blows, a ducking, the pillory, a shouting mob pelting him with offal, and a dead cat tied round his neck: these were cogent arguments, and their general drift was not to be mistaken. He saw that he had made a mistake about his fellow-men and that friendliness was a fool’s policy. Released from the stocks, he dragged himself back home and lay down to rest; and after a long terror-haunted sleep he rose in the early dawn, and began dismantling the hut that had sheltered him for five years and the smaller hut that had sheltered his horse. An hour or two later, having loaded the wagon with his goods and chattels and the wreckage of his home, he drove off. Since the road he intended to follow must take him through the High Street, scene of his humiliation, he carried in the wagon, within easy reach of his hand, a loaded fowling-piece, which he was resolved to use against any man that offered to oppose him. He was a little mad, and more than a little murderous; and, though this first fury burned less fiercely as the days went by, it was never extinguished; for from that moment he counted every man his enemy and every woman easy and treacherous. It is hardly too much to say that six hours in the stocks had made a new man of Harry Noke: punishment had achieved its sublime purpose.