..«
    Tom walked on without looking round, and Yap followed his example, the cold
bath having moderated his passions.
    »Go along wi' you, then, wi' your drownded dog; I wouldn't own such a dog -
I wouldn't,« said Bob, getting louder, in a last effort to sustain his defiance.
But Tom was not to be provoked into turning round, and Bob's voice began to
falter a little as he said,
    »An' I'n gi'en you everything, an' showed you everything, an' niver wanted
nothin' from you .... An' there's your horn-handed knife, then, as you gi'en me«
.... Here Bob flung the knife as far as he could after Tom's retreating
footsteps. But it produced no effect, except the sense in Bob's mind that there
was a terrible void in his lot, now that knife was gone.
    He stood still till Tom had passed through the gate and disappeared behind
the hedge. The knife would do no good on the ground there - it wouldn't vex Tom,
and pride or resentment was a feeble passion in Bob's mind compared with the
love of a pocket-knife. His very fingers sent entreating thrills that he would
go and clutch that familiar rough buck's-horn handle, which they had so often
grasped for mere affection as it lay idle in his pocket. And there were two
blades, and they had just been sharpened! What is life without a pocket-knife to
him who has once tasted a higher existence? No: to throw the handle after the
hatchet is a comprehensible act of desperation, but to throw one's pocket-knife
after an implacable friend is clearly in every sense a hyperbole, or throwing
beyond the mark. So Bob shuffled back to the spot where the beloved knife lay in
the dirt, and felt quite a new pleasure in clutching it again after the
temporary separation, in opening one blade after the other, and feeling their
edge with his well-hardened thumb. Poor Bob! he was not sensitive on the point
of honour - not a chivalrous character. That fine moral aroma would not have
been thought much of by the public opinion of Kennel Yard, which was the very
focus or heart of Bob's world, even if it could have made itself perceptible
there; yet, for all that, he was not utterly a sneak and a thief, as our friend
Tom had hastily decided.
    But
