He derived a sardonic amusement from noting the fact that this “spiritual blood-money,” which had cost him his secretest happiness, was apparently smoothing away altogether the moral bruise left by the Weevil incident. That “brown coat” might return to his mind now and then. Hers it seemingly troubled no more. As for the luckless water-rat, he did not show his face again. Wolf’s private inkling was that he had been indignantly dismissed, once for all, in some brief scene to which the girl never alluded. But it may easily have been that the lad himself was frightened by the length to which he had gone. Wolf certainly found, in his own weary introspection into the feelings of a cuckold, that he had a tendency to avoid that part of the town where the sausage-shop was!⁠ ⁠…

His lunch over, Wolf strode back more dispirited than ever to the scene of his pillory.