“Really!” said Mrs Swann.  “How queer!  But what a good idea!”

She might have confessed then.  But you do not know her if you think she did.  Gilbert came in, anxious and alarmed.  Mrs Clayton Vernon left them together.  The mother explained matters to the son, and in an instant of time the ruin of two magnificent potatoes was at the back of the fire.  Then, without saluting Mrs Clayton Vernon, Mrs Swann fled.

HALF-A-SOVEREIGN

The scene was the up-platform of Knype railway station on a summer afternoon, and, more particularly, that part of the platform round about the bookstall.  There were three persons in the neighbourhood of the bookstall.  The first was the principal bookstall clerk, who was folding with extraordinary rapidity copies of the special edition of the Staffordshire Signal; the second was Mr Sandbach, an earthenware manufacturer, famous throughout the Five Towns for his ingenious invention of teapots that will pour the tea into the cup instead of all over the table; and a very shabby man, whom Mr Sandbach did not know.  This very shabby man was quite close to the bookstall, while Mr Sandbach stood quite ten yards away.  Mr Sandbach gazed steadily at the man, but the man, ignoring Mr Sandbach, allowed dreamy and abstracted eyes to rest on the far distance, where a locomotive or so was impatiently pushing and pulling waggons as an excitable mother will drag and shove an inoffensive child.  The platform as a whole was sparsely peopled; the London train had recently departed, and the station was suffering from the usual reaction; only a local train was signalled.

Mr Gale, a friend of Mr Sandbach’s, came briskly on to the platform from the booking-office, caught sight of Mr Sandbach, and accosted him.

“Hello, Sandbach!”

“How do, Gale?”

To a slight extent they were rivals in the field of invention.  But both had succeeded in life, and both had the alert and prosperous air of success.  Born about the same time, they stood nearly equal after forty years of earthly endeavour.

“What are you doing here?” asked Gale, casually.

“I’ve come to meet someone off the Crewe train.”

“And I’m going by it—­to Derby,” said Mr Gale.  “They say it’s thirteen minutes late.”

“Look here,” said Mr Sandbach, taking no notice of this remark, “you see that man there?”

“Which one—­by the bookstall?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what about him?”

“I bet you you can’t make him move from where he is—­no physical force, of course.”

Mr Gale hesitated an instant, and then his eye glistened with response to the challenge, and he replied: 

“I bet you I can.”

“Well, try,” said Mr Sandbach.