to the door.

'What th' old folks lose,' murmured Meshach, apparently to the fire, as
he put his half-consumed cigar into a meerschaum holder, 'goes to the
profit of young Burgess, as is waiting outside the Bank at top o' th'
Square.'

'I see,' said Twemlow, and thought primly that in his day such laxities
were not permitted.

Hannah and the servant cleared the tea-table, and the two men were left
alone, each silently reducing an J.S. Murias to ashes. Meshach seemed to
grow smaller in his padded chair by the hob, to become torpid, and to
lose that keen sense of his own astuteness which alone gave zest to his
life. Arthur stared out of the window at the confined backyard. The
autumn dusk thickened.

Suddenly Meshach sprang up and lighted the gas, and as he adjusted the
height of the flame, he remarked casually: 'So your sister Alice is as
poorly off as ever?'

Twemlow assented with a nod. 'By the way,' he said, 'you told me on
Wednesday you had something interesting to show me.'

Meshach made no answer, but picked up the poker and struck several times
a large pewter platter on the mantelpiece.

'Do you want anything, brother?' said Hannah, hastening into the room.

'Go up into my bedroom, sister, and in the left-hand pigeon-hole in the
bureau you'll see a little flat tissue-paper parcel. Bring it me. It's
marked J.S.'

'Yes, brother,' and she departed.

'You said as your father had told your sister as he never got no more
than two hundred a year from th' partnership after he retired.'

'Yes,' Twemlow replied. 'That's what she wrote me. In fact she sent me
the old chap's letter to read. So I reckoned it cost him most all he got
to live.'

'Well,' the old man said, and Hannah returned with the parcel, which he
carefully unwrapped. 'That'll do, sister.' Hannah disappeared. 'Sithee!'
He mysteriously drew Arthur's attention to a little green book whose
cover still showed traces of mud and water.

'And what's this?' Twemlow asked with assumed lightness.

Meshach gave him the history of his adventure at the fire, and then
laboriously displayed and expounded the contents of the book, peering
into the yellow pages through the steel-rimmed spectacles which he had
put on for the purpose.

'And you've kept it all this time?' said Twemlow.

'I've kept it,' answered the old man grimly, and Twemlow felt that that
was precisely what Meshach Myatt might have been expected to do.

'See,' said Meshach, and their heads