death from heart disease. Happily, he had
had a very good week indeed with his rents. He trotted about all day on
Mondays and on Tuesday mornings, gathering his rents, and on Tuesday
afternoons he usually experienced the assuaged content of an alligator
after the weekly meal. Otherwise there was no knowing what might not
have been the disastrous consequences of Helen's barefaced robbery and
of her unscrupulous, unrepentant defence of that robbery. For days and
days he had imagined himself in heaven with a seraph who was also a good
cook. He had forty times congratulated himself on catching Helen. And
now...!

But it must stop.

Then he thought of the cooking. His mouth remembered its first taste of
the incomparable kidney omelette. What an ecstasy! Still, a ten-pound
note for even a kidney omelette jarred on the fineness of his sense of
values.

A feminine laugh--Helen's--came down the narrow stairs and through the
kitchen.... No, the whole house was altered, with well-bred,
distinguished women's laughter floating about the stairs like that.

He called upon his lifelong friend and comforter--the concertina. That
senseless thing of rose-wood, ivory, ebony, mother-of-pearl, and leather
was to him what a brother, a pipe, a bull terrier, a trusted confidant,
might have been to another James. And now, in the accents of the
Hallelujah Chorus, it yielded to his squeezings the secret and sublime
solace which men term poetry.

Then there was a second, and equally imperious, knock at the door.

He loosed his fingers from his friend, and opened the door.

Mr. Emanuel Prockter stood on the doorstep. Mr. Emanuel Prockter wore a
beautiful blue suit, with a white waistcoat and pale gold tie; yellow
gloves, boots with pointed toes, a glossy bowler hat, a cane, and an
eyeglass. He was an impeccable young man, and the avowed delight of his
tailor, whose bills were paid by Mrs. Prockter.

"Is Miss Rathbone at home?" asked Emanuel, after a cough.

"Helen?"

"Ye-es."

"Ay," said James, grimly. "Her's quite at home."

"Can I see her?"

James opened more widely the door. "Happen you'd better step inside,"
said he.

"Thanks, Mr. Ollerenshaw. What--er--fine weather we're having!"

James ignored this quite courteous and truthful remark. He shut the
door, went into the kitchen, and called up the stairs: "Helen, a young
man to see ye."

In the bedroom, Helen and Sarah Swetnam had exhausted the Brunt hat, and
were spaciously a