“If it’s all true—and I believe it is already, Miss Youson—I—I am going to withdraw from the prosecution, and ask your father to bring an action against me for illegal detention.”
“Oh! he would never think of such a thing.”
And he never did. The story was quite true, every word of it, and we arranged to keep it from the old man, so far as the peculiar profession of his first-born was concerned. He never knew that. I got rather intimate with the Youson family by degrees, although our acquaintance had begun so inauspiciously. Rather intimate, I say—well, very intimate, rather! would be a clear expression, if a trifle inelegant.
For I married that girl, and pensioned off Mrs. Kibbey, and I never did such a fine stroke of business in all my life. The old man—he was a fine old fellow, too—went to Madeira with Kitty and the boy, and I bore Lucinda off to Streatham. She is one of the best of wives, and so very handy in the business too—saves me a heap of money. It was a lucky day for me when that rascal of a half-brother of hers broke burglariously into Golden Birch Villa, and took away everything that had an atom’s worth of precious metal in its composition. It was a blessing very much in disguise, but it has answered its purpose thoroughly well. I am as happy as the day is long—and so is Lucinda. Everybody tells me that I secured a treasure when I took her for better, for worse. Everybody but Mrs. Kibbey—past housekeeper, and living with her sister now in the Cookshops Almshouses at Caterham—and she says I could have done much better for myself, long before, if I had only looked about me in a sensible and practical sort of way.
mr. george newnes.