! in different
fashion. Five and twenty minutes before the departure of the train,
Mrs. Harris--but not the Mrs. Harris of customary days--presented
herself, bearing his hat and stick. Her cheerful smile had departed.
There were traces of something very much like tears in her eyes. She
carried a small article in her hand, which she spent most of the time
trying to conceal behind her apron.

"You'll be home at the usual time, sir?" she asked.

"So far as I know, Mrs. Harris," was the listless reply.

His landlady looked at the practically undisturbed breakfast table and
gathered strength of purpose.

"Me and Harris, sir," she declared, "we offers our respects and we
hopes nothing ain't going to be changed here."

"You are very good--both of you," Jacob said, with a weak smile. "For
the present I don't think that I could live cheaper anywhere else,
nor, I am sure, as comfortably. I have had quite a decent situation
offered me. The only thing is I may be away a little more."

"That's good news, sir, anyway," the woman replied heartily. "I mean
to say," she added, "it's good news about your staying on here. And me
and Harris," she went on, "having no children, so to speak, and you
having paid liberal and regular for the last four years, we seem to
have a bit of money we've no use for," she added, producing at last
that bulging purse, "and we thought maybe you might do us the
honour--"

Jacob took her by the shoulders and shook her.

"For God's sake, don't, Mrs. Harris!" he broke in. "If I want it, I'll
come to you. And--God bless you!"

Whereupon he picked up his hat and stick, stepped through the open
French window, cut a rose for his buttonhole as usual, and started on
his purgatorial walk, making a tremendous effort to look as though
nothing had happened.

That walk, alas! surpassed his worst imaginings. Jacob Pratt was a
sensitive little man, notwithstanding his rotund body, his fresh
complexion and humorous mouth; and all the way from his modest abode
to the railway station, he was a prey to fancies which were in some
cases, without a doubt, founded upon fact. Mr. Gregson, the manager of
the International Stores, at the passing of his discredited customer
had certainly retreated from his position on the threshold of his
shop, usual at that hour of the morning, and disclosed a morbid but
absorbing interest in a tub of margarine. The greengrocer's wife had
looked at him reproachfully from behind a heap of co