over to visit the more aristocratic manufactories at
Knype and Cauldon, that some one from Bursley had met Arthur at the
Leipzig Easter Fair and reported him stout, taciturn, and Americanised.
Then, one morning in Lord Street, Liverpool, fifteen years after the
death of old Twemlow and the misappropriation of the little book,
Meshach encountered Arthur Twemlow himself; Meshach was returning from
his autumn holiday in the Isle of Man, and Arthur had just landed from
the 'Servia.' The two men were mutually impressed by each other's skill
in nicely conducting an interview which ninety-nine people out of a
hundred would have botched; for they had last met as boy of seventeen
and man of forty. They lunched richly at the Adelphi, and gave news for
news. Arthur's buyer, it seemed, was dead, and after a day or two in
London Arthur was coming to the Five Towns to buy a little in person.
Meshach inquired about Alice in Australia, and was told that things were
in a specially bad way with the tea-blender. He said that you couldn't
cure a fool, and remarked casually upon the smallness of the amount left
by old Twemlow. Arthur, unaware that Meshach Myatt was raising up an
idea which for fifteen years had been buried but never forgotten in his
mind, answered with nonchalance that the amount certainly was rather
small. Arthur added that in his dying letter of forgiveness to Alice the
old man had stated that his income from the works during the last years
of his life had been less than two hundred per annum. Meshach worked his
shut thin lips up and down and then began to discuss other matters. But
as they parted at Lime Street Station the observer of life said to
Arthur with presaging calm: 'You'll be i' th' Five Towns at the end of
the week. Come and have a cup o' tea with me and Hannah on Saturday
afternoon. The old spot, you know it, top of Church Street. I've
something to show you as 'll interest you.' There was a pause and an
interchange of glances. 'Right!' said Arthur Twemlow. 'Thank you! I'll
be there at a quarter after four or thereabouts.' 'It's like as if what
must be!' Meshach murmured to himself with almost sad resignation, in
the enigmatic idiom of the Five Towns. But he was highly pleased that
he, the first of all the townsfolk, should have seen Arthur Twemlow
after twenty-five years' absence.

When Hannah, in silk, met the most interesting and disconcerting
American stranger in the lobby, the sound and the smell of Bursl