ill keep your promise to
the letter?'

'I will,' said the Major, and Miss Blossom waved her parasol to the
children. 'You must give the poor elephant a rest, he is tired,' she
cried, and the tender-hearted Batsy needed no more to make her descend
from the great earth-shaking beast. The children attacked her with
kisses, and then walked off, looking back, each holding one of the
paternal hands, and treading, after the manner of childhood, on the
paternal toes.

Miss Blossom walked till she met an opportune omnibus.

About an hour later a four-wheeler bore a woman with blazing eyes, and a
pile of trunks gaping untidily, from the Major's house in St. John's Wood
Road.

The Honourable Company had won its first victory: Major Apsley, having
fulfilled Miss Blossom's commands, had seen what she expected him to see,
and was disentangled from Miss Limmer.

The children still call their new stepmother None-so-pretty.

IV. ADVENTURE OF THE RICH UNCLE

'His God is his belly, Mr. Graham,' said the client, 'and if the text
strikes you as disagreeably unrefined, think how it must pain me to speak
thus of an uncle, if only by marriage.'

The client was a meagre matron of forty-five, or thereabouts. Her dark
scant hair was smooth, and divided down the middle. Acerbity spoke in
every line of her face, which was of a dusky yellow, where it did not
rather verge on the faint hues of a violet past its prime. She wore
thread gloves, and she carried a battered reticule of early Victorian
days, in which Merton suspected that tracts were lurking. She had an
anxious peevish mouth; in truth she was not the kind of client in whom
Merton's heart delighted.

And yet he was sorry for her, especially as her rich uncle's cook was the
goddess of the gentleman whose god had just been denounced in scriptural
terms by the client, a Mrs. Gisborne. She was sad, as well she might be,
for she was a struggler, with a large family, and great expectations from
the polytheistic uncle who adored his cook and one of his nobler organs.

'What has his history been, this gentleman's--Mr. Fulton, I think you
called him?'

'He was a drysalter in the City, sir,' and across Merton's mind flitted a
vision of a dark shop with Finnan haddocks, bacon, and tongues in the
window, and smelling terribly of cheese.

'Oh, a drysalter?' he said, not daring to display ignorance by asking
questions to corroborate his theory of the drysalting business.

'