"She's my Mrs. Hepworth."
"Your Mrs. Hepworth?"
"Althea Rees, the authoress."
He jumped up, and began to pace the floor savagely. "That's so like you. I suspect something; I send you down because you can gush, and, instead of sending your stuff out early and getting the scoop, you turn up late, with ten lines for the public and a lot of tripe about 'a woman's heart' for me."
Well, like Fenella, I 'smouthed' him down. He wasn't a bad little beast, when you knew him—Winstanley. It wasn't his fault if his veins were full of printer's ink. I told him the Herald and the Courier were doing the same as me. He sat grumbling.
"Turn in your stuff, then, and come back here. I'll send down Chaffers to-morrow, and you can do old Astbury at the City Carlton. You don't deserve anything better."
But Chaffers, and a good many other people, had their trouble for nothing. Next morning Nicholls arose in a packed court and announced that, after consultation, his client had decided to withdraw his defence, and would take a verdict by consent; each party to pay their own costs, and neither custody of nor access to the child of the marriage to be sought. Which decision Sir William Vieille, the president, commended in a little speech that left no doubt which way his direction would have gone. And I, hearing the result at midday, sent Althea the biggest bunch of pale violets I could find in St. Swithin's Lane. The price of violets in July, was, I admit, an eye-opener.
You will have guessed it was not on principle alone that I took all this trouble and risk. I had interviewed Althea a year before on some shop-assistants' movement or other (she was a woman of varied activities); and something in the name upon the card I had sent in seemed to strike her. When the interview was over she asked me to wait, and, having left the room for a few moments, came back with her father. Mr. Rees was a big, old-time, orating and banqueting type of American citizen, with a clean-shaven, ivory-white face and thick silver hair. He carried a great expanse of starched shirt-front, wore a narrow black tie, and I rather fancied I detected Wellington boots under his broadcloth trousers. He had my card in his hand.
"Your name is Hyacinth Prentice?"