“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 anything else to be done, so he just made as if he thought it funny, though I doubt if at the time he saw the full humour of it.