rench followed the course of the majority, only a little
more so: tried to do others a precious sight sharper than himself, and
got done; tried a dozen times to scramble up again, each time coming down
heavier than before, till there wasn't another spring left in him, and
his only ambition victuals. Then, of course, he thought of his wife--it's
a wonderful domesticator, ill luck--and wondered what she was doing.

"Fortunately for him, she'd been doing well. Her father died and left
her a bit, just a couple of hundred or so, and with this and her own
savings she started with a small inn in a growing town, and had sold out
again three years later at four times what she had paid for it. She had
done even better than that for herself. She had developed a talent for
cooking--that was a settled income in itself,--and at this time was
running a small hotel in Brighton, and making it pay to a tune that would
have made the shareholders of some of its bigger rivals a bit envious
could they have known.

"He came to me, having found out, I don't know how--necessity smartens
the wits, I suppose,--that my missis still kept up a sort of friendship
with her, and begged me to try and arrange a meeting between them, which
I did, though I told him frankly that from what I knew his welcome
wouldn't be much more enthusiastic than what he'd any right to expect.
But he was always of a sanguine disposition; and borrowing his fare and
an old greatcoat of mine, he started off, evidently thinking that all his
troubles were over.

"But they weren't exactly. The Married Women's Property Act had altered
things a bit, and Master James found himself greeted without any
suggestion of tenderness by a business-like woman of thirty-six or
thereabouts, and told to wait in the room behind the bar till she could
find time to talk to him.

"She kept him waiting there for three-quarters of an hour, just
sufficient time to take the side out of him; and then she walks in and
closes the door behind her.

"'I'd say you hadn't changed hardly a day, Susan,' says he, 'if it wasn't
that you'd grown handsomer than ever.'

"I guess he'd been turning that over in his mind during the
three-quarters of an hour. It was his fancy that he knew a bit about
women.

"'My name's Mrs. Wrench,' says she; 'and if you take your hat off and
stand up while I'm talking to you it will be more what I'm accustomed
to.'

"Well, that staggered him a bit; but there didn't seem