skin mantle
can fit.

"My word--it's warm!" she said. This was her sole comment.

"Keep it on," said Denry.

His mother's glance withered the suggestion.

"Where are you going?" he asked, as she left the room.

"To put it away," said she. "I must get some moth-powder to-morrow."

He protested with inarticulate noises, removed his own furs, which he
threw down on to the old worn-out sofa, and drew a Windsor chair up to
the fire. After a while his mother returned, and sat down in her
rocking-chair, and began to shiver again under the shawl and the
antimacassar. The lamp on the table lighted up the left side of her face
and the right side of his.

"Look here, mother," said he, "you must have a doctor."

"I shall have no doctor."

"You've got influenza, and it's a very tricky business--influenza is;
you never know where you are with it."

"Ye can call it influenza if ye like," said Mrs Machin. "There was no
influenza in my young days. We called a cold a cold."

"Well," said Denry, "you aren't well, are you?"

"I never said I was," she answered grimly.

"No," said Denry, with the triumphant ring of one who is about to
devastate an enemy. "And you never will be in this rotten old cottage."

"This was reckoned a very good class of house when your father and I
came into it. And it's always been kept in repair. It was good enough
for your father, and it's good enough for me. I don't see myself
flitting. But some folks have gotten so grand. As for health, old Reuben
next door is ninety-one. How many people over ninety are there in those
gimcrack houses up by the Park, I should like to know?"

Denry could argue with any one save his mother. Always, when he was
about to reduce her to impotence, she fell on him thus and rolled him in
the dust. Still, he began again.

"Do we pay four-and-sixpence a week for this cottage, or don't we?" he
demanded.

"And always have done," said Mrs Machin. "I should like to see the
landlord put it up," she added, formidably, as if to say: "I'd landlord
him, if he tried to put _my_ rent up!"

"Well," said Denry, "here we are living in a four-and-six-a-week
cottage, and do you know how much I'm making? I'm making two thousand
pounds a year. That's what I'm making."

A second wilful deception of his mother! As Managing Director of the
Five Towns Universal Thrift Club, as proprietor of the majority of its
shares, as its absolute autocrat, he was making very nearly four
thousand a