“Well, if you can persuade him to go,” said Alice, “if you can make him see his duty, you’re welcome.  But I’m sorry for you.  I think I ought to tell you that this is my house, and my furniture.  He’s got nothing at all.  I expect he never could save.  Many’s the blow he’s laid on me in anger, but all the same I pity him.  I pity him.  And I wouldn’t like to leave him in the lurch.  Perhaps these three strong young men’ll be able to do something with him.  But I’m not sure.  He’s very strong.  And he has a way of leaping out so sudden like.”

Mrs. Leek shook her head as memories of the past rose up in her mind.

“The fact is,” said Matthew sternly, “he ought to be prosecuted for bigamy.  That’s what ought to be done.”

“Most decidedly,” Henry concurred.

“You’re quite right!  You’re quite right!” said Alice.  “That’s only justice.  Of course he’d deny that he was the same Henry Leek.  He’d deny it like anything.  But in the end I dare say you’d be able to prove it.  The worst of these law cases is they’re so expensive.  It means private detectives and all sorts of things, I believe.  Of course there’d be the scandal.  But don’t mind me!  I’m innocent.  Everybody knows me in Putney, and has done this twenty years.  I don’t know how it would suit you, Mr. Henry and Mr. Matthew, as clergymen, to have your own father in prison.  That’s as may be.  But justice is justice, and there’s too many men going about deceiving simple, trusting women.  I’ve often heard such tales.  Now I know they’re all true.  It’s a mercy my own poor mother hasn’t lived to see where I am to-day.  As for my father, old as he was, if he’d been alive, there’d have been horsewhipping that I do know.”

After some rather pointless and disjointed remarks from the curates, a sound came from the corner near the door.  It was John’s cough.

“Better clear out of this!” John ejaculated.  Such was his first and last oral contribution to the scene.

In the Bath

Priam Farll was wandering about the uncharted groves of Wimbledon Common, and uttering soliloquies in language that lacked delicacy.  He had rushed forth, in his haste, without an overcoat, and the weather was blusterously inclement.  But he did not feel the cold; he only felt the keen wind of circumstance.

Soon after the purchase of his picture by the lunatic landlord of a fully licensed house, he had discovered that the frame-maker in High Street knew a man who would not be indisposed to buy such pictures as he could paint, and transactions between him and the frame-maker had developed into a regular trade.  The usual price paid for canvases was ten pounds, in cash.  By this means he had earned about two hundred a year.  No questions were put on either side.  The paintings were delivered at intervals, and the money received; and Priam knew no more.  For many weeks he had lived in daily expectation of an uproar, a scandal