ed by directing his affections to a
partner instinct with Yorkshire shrewdness; and with shrewdness go other
qualities that make for success rather than for happiness. Hezekiah, had
circumstances been equal, might have been his friend's rival for Janet's
capable and saving hand, had not sweet-tempered, laughing Annie
Glossop--directed by Providence to her moral welfare, one must
presume--fallen in love with him. Between Jane's virtues and Annie's
three hundred golden sovereigns Hezekiah had not hesitated a moment.
Golden sovereigns were solid facts; wifely virtues, by a serious-minded
and strong-willed husband, could be instilled--at all events,
light-heartedness suppressed. The two men, Hezekiah urged by his own
ambition, Solomon by his wife's, had arrived in London within a year of
one another: Hezekiah to open a grocer's shop in Kensington, which those
who should have known assured him was a hopeless neighbourhood. But
Hezekiah had the instinct of the money-maker. Solomon, after looking
about him, had fixed upon the roomy, substantial house in Nevill's Court
as a promising foundation for a printer's business.

That was ten years ago. The two friends, scorning delights, living
laborious days, had seen but little of one another. Light-hearted Annie
had borne to her dour partner two children who had died. Nathaniel
George, with the luck supposed to wait on number three, had lived on,
and, inheriting fortunately the temperament of his mother, had brought
sunshine into the gloomy rooms above the shop in High Street, Kensington.
Mrs. Grindley, grown weak and fretful, had rested from her labours.

Mrs. Appleyard's guardian angel, prudent like his protege, had waited
till Solomon's business was well established before despatching the stork
to Nevill's Court, with a little girl. Later had sent a boy, who, not
finding the close air of St. Dunstan to his liking, had found his way
back again; thus passing out of this story and all others. And there
remained to carry on the legend of the Grindleys and the Appleyards only
Nathaniel George, now aged five, and Janet Helvetia, quite a beginner,
who took lift seriously.

There are no such things as facts. Narrow-minded folk--surveyors,
auctioneers, and such like--would have insisted that the garden between
the old Georgian house and Nevill's Court was a strip of land one hundred
and eighteen feet by ninety-two, containing a laburnum tree, six laurel
bushes, and a dwarf de