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There was a struggle going on in the heart of Jabez. It was in his power to revenge himself for many taunts and sarcasms, and much previous abuse. He called to mind—for thought is swift—that Shrove Tuesday when Laurence and his friends caught him as he descended Mrs. Clowes’s steps with a penny-worth of humbugs in his hand, and snatching his cap from his head, kicked it about Half Street and the churchyard as a football. And he seemed to feel again the twitch at his dark hair and the dreadful pain in his spine and loins, as they bent him backwards over the coping of the low wall, in order to wrest his sweets from him, and held him there perforce till stout Mrs. Clowes, armed with a rolling-pin, came to his rescue, laying about her vigorously, and kept him in her back parlour until he revived.

“Forgive and forget” are words for the angels, and Jabez was not an angel, but a boy with quick beating pulses, and a vivid memory. There was a fight going on in his breast fiercer than either that in Half Street or that in the College Yard. His sore, stiff limbs and smarting brow urged him like voices to “pay him off for all,” and revenge began to have a sweet savour in his mouth.