uilt
the frontages in handsome freestone. He had also purchased several
shops opposite, and rumour said that it was his intention to offer these
latter to the Town Council at a low figure if the Council would cut a
new street leading from his premises to the Market Square. Such a scheme
would have met with general approval. But there was one serious hiatus
in the plans of Ezra Brunt--to wit, No. 54, Machin Street. No. 54,
separating 52 and 56, was a chemist's shop, shabby but sedate as to
appearance, owned and occupied by George Christopher Timmis, a mild and
venerable citizen, and a local preacher in the Wesleyan Methodist
Connexion. For nearly thirty years Brunt had coveted Mr. Timmis's shop;
more than twenty years have elapsed since he first opened negotiations
for it. Mr. Timmis was by no means eager to sell--indeed, his attitude
was distinctly a repellent one--but a bargain would undoubtedly have
been concluded had not a report reached the ears of Mr. Timmis to the
effect that Ezra Brunt had remarked at the Turk's Head that 'th' old
leech was only sticking out for every brass farthing he could get.' The
report was untrue, but Mr. Timmis believed it, and from that moment Ezra
Brunt's chances of obtaining the chemist's shop vanished completely.
His lawyer expended diplomacy in vain, raising the offer week by week
till the incredible sum of three thousand pounds was reached. Then Ezra
Brunt himself saw Mr. Timmis, and without a word of prelude said:

'Will ye take three thousand guineas for this bit o' property?'

'Not thirty thousand guineas,' said Mr. Timmis quietly; the stern pride
of the benevolent old local preacher had been aroused.

'Then be damned to you!' said Ezra Brunt, who had never been known to
swear before.

Thenceforth a feud existed, not less bitter because it was a feud in
which nothing was said and nothing done--a silent and implacable mutual
resistance. The sole outward sign of it was the dirty and stumpy
brown-brick shop-front of Mr. Timmis, squeezed in between those massive
luxurious facades of stone which Ezra Brunt soon afterwards erected. The
pharmaceutical business of Mr. Timmis was not a very large one, and,
fiscally, Ezra Brunt could have swallowed him at a meal and suffered no
inconvenience; but in that the aged chemist had lived on just half his
small income for some fifty years past, his position was impregnable.
Hanbridge smiled cynically at this _impasse_ produced by an idle word,