nah, feeling that he was making an appointment with this
fascinating stranger.

As she left the shop she handed Jonah a card, on which was printed:

MISS CLARA GRIMES,
TEACHER OF MUSIC.
Terms: 1 pound 1 shilling per quarter.

"Well, I'm damned!" said Jonah. "Old Grimes's daughter, of course."
And as he watched her crossing the street with a quick, alert step, an
intense yearning and loneliness came over him. Something within him
contracted till it hurt. And suddenly there flashed across his mind
some half-forgotten words of Mrs Yabsley's:

"Don't think of marryin' till yer feel there's somethin' wrong wi' yer
inside, for that's w'ere it ketches yer."

He sighed heavily, and went into the shop, preoccupied and silent for
that day.

CHAPTER 13

A FAMILY IN EXILE

Dad Grimes had just finished the story of his nose and the cabman, and
the group in the bar of the Angel exploded like a shell. Dicky
Freeman's mouth seemed to slip both ways at once till it reached his
ears. The barman put down the glass he was wiping and twisted the
cloth in his fingers till the tears stood in his eyes. The noise was
deafening.

"An' 'e sez, 'Cum on, you an' yer nose, an' I'll fight the pair o'
yez,'" spluttered Dicky, with hysterical gasps, and went off again.
His chuckles ended in a dead silence. There was no sound but the rapid
breathing of the men. The barman flattened a mosquito on his cheek,
the smack sounded like a kiss. Dicky Freeman emptied his glass, and
then stared through the bottom as if he wondered where the liquor had
gone.

"I assure you for the moment I was staggered," said Dad, rounding off
his story. "I am aware that my nose has added to the gaiety of
nations, but it was the first time that it had been reckoned as a
creature distinct from myself with an individuality of its own."

Dad Grimes was a man of fifty, wearing a frock coat that showed a faint
green where the light fell on the shoulders, and a tall silk hat that
had grown old with the wearer. But for his nose he might have been an
undertaker. It was an impossible nose, the shape and size of a potato,
and the colour of pickled cabbage--the nose for a clown in the Carnival
of Venice. Its marvellous shape was none of Dad's choosing, but the
colour was his own, laid on by years of patient drinking as a man
colours a favourite pipe. Years ago, when he was a bank manager, his
heart had bled at the sight of this ungainly protuberan