I clasped his hand.
“I sincerely hope so,” I said.
“It’s even more powerful,” he said, “than Without are Dogs.”
It was in this fashion then that I became show-room manager with an added, though insufficient emolument, for Mr. Maidstone, when he arrived the next morning, was at once dismissed after a brief interview. Explaining at first that he had failed to attend owing to a very violent bilious headache, he was of course unable, when pressed by Mr. Chrysostom, to deny the truth of my allegations; and it subsequently emerged that, after a night in the police station, he had been fined ten shillings by the local magistrate. Nor did his resentment, when he came downstairs again, assume the physical character that I had feared, although I had taken the precaution of keeping Miss Botterill beside me and holding my police whistle in my left hand. On the contrary, he seemed to recognize not only the grossness of his delinquency, but the inevitable nature of the consequences that had so rightly ensued.
“Well, you’ve done me in, laddie,” he said. “But I suppose I deserved it.”
“I regret to say,” I replied, “that there can be no doubt of it.”
“But it’s going to be hard,” he added, “on the wife and family.”
“The wages of sin,” I said, “are never easy.”
Then Miss Botterill sniffed and pulled out her handkerchief, and Mr. Maidstone closed the street door, and but for a diverting sequel upon the following Friday, the incident closed very satisfactorily. Upon that morning, however, Mr. Maidstone’s three elder children, a girl and two boys, all apparently under fourteen, entered the show-room and peremptorily demanded to be taken upstairs to Mr. Chrysostom Lorton. By names, Polly, Arthur, and George, they had come to apply for their father’s reinstatement, chiefly, as they alleged, on account of their mother, whom they described as suffering from pulmonary consumption. Needless to say, much to their obvious discomfiture, Mr. Chrysostom refused to see them, and after a brief consultation, they filed out again very much more humbly than they had come in. Unpleasant children, it was an amusing episode, and I could not help laughing somewhat heartily, although Polly, who appeared to be the eldest, made a grimace at me as she went out.