cted appearances. At
forty his fame was assured; at fifty he was an institution; at sixty an
oracle.

'Meshach's a mixture,' ran the local phrase; but in this mixture there
was a less tedious posturing and a more massive intellect than usually
go to the achievement of a provincial renown such as Meshach's. The
man's externals were deceptive, for he looked like a local curiosity who
might never have been out of Bursley. Meshach, however, travelled
sometimes in the British Isles, and thereby kept his ideas from
congealing. And those who had met him in trains and hotels knew that
porters, waiters, and drivers did not mistake his shrewdness for that of
a simpleton determined not to be robbed; that he wanted the right things
and had the art to get them; in short, that he was an expert in travel.
Like many old provincial bachelors, while frugal at home he could be
profuse abroad, exercising the luxurious freedom of the bachelor. In the
course of years it grew slowly upon his fellow pew-holders at the big
Sytch Chapel that he was worldly-minded and possibly contemptuous of
their codes; some, who made a specialty of smelling rats, accused him of
gaiety.

'You'd happen better get something extra for tea, sister,' said Meshach,
rousing himself.

'Why, brother?' demanded Hannah.

'Some sausage, happen,' Meshach proceeded.

'Is any one coming?' she asked.

'Or a bit of fish,' said Meshach, gazing meditatively at the fire.

Hannah rose and interrogated his face. 'You ought to have told me
before, brother. It's past three now, and Saturday afternoon too!' So
saying, she hurried anxiously into the kitchen and told the servant to
put her hat on.

'Who is it that's coming, brother?' she inquired later, with timid,
ravenous curiosity.

'I see you'll have it out of me,' said Meshach, who gave up mysteries as
a miser parts with gold. 'It's Arthur Twemlow from New York; and let
that stop your mouth.'

Thus, with the utterance of this name in the prim, archaic, stuffy
little back-parlour, Meshach raised the curtain on the last act of a
drama which had slumbered for fifteen years, since the death of William
Twemlow, and which the principal actors in it had long thought to be
concluded or suppressed.

The whole matter could be traced back, through a series of situations
which had developed one out of another, to the character of old Twemlow;
but the final romantic solution was only rendered possible by the
peculiarities of Mesh