‘Who is it that’s coming, brother?’ she inquired later, with timid, ravenous curiosity.

‘I see you’ll have it out of me,’ said Meshach, who gave up mysteries as a miser parts with gold.  ’It’s Arthur Twemlow from New York; and let that stop your mouth.’

Thus, with the utterance of this name in the prim, archaic, stuffy little back-parlour, Meshach raised the curtain on the last act of a drama which had slumbered for fifteen years, since the death of William Twemlow, and which the principal actors in it had long thought to be concluded or suppressed.

The whole matter could be traced back, through a series of situations which had developed one out of another, to the character of old Twemlow; but the final romantic solution was only rendered possible by the peculiarities of Meshach Myatt.  William Twemlow had been one of those men in whom an unbridled appetite for virtue becomes a vice.  He loved God with such virulence that he killed his wife, drove his daughter into a fatuous marriage, and quarrelled irrevocably with his son.  The too sensitive wife died for lack of joy; Alice escaped to Australia with a parson who never accomplished anything but a large family; and Arthur, at the age of seventeen, precociously cursed his father and sought in America a land where there were fewer commandments.  Then old Twemlow told his junior partner, John Stanway, that the ways of Providence were past finding out.  Stanway sympathised with him, partly from motives of diplomacy, and partly from a genuine misunderstanding of the case; for Twemlow, mild, earnest, and a generous supporter of charities, was much respected in the town, and his lonely predicament excited compassion; most people looked upon young Arthur as a godless and heartless vagabond.

Alice’s husband was a fool, impulsive and vain; and, despite introductions, no congregation in Australia could be persuaded to listen to his version of the gospel; Alice gave birth to more children than bad sermons could keep alive, and soon the old man at Bursley was regularly sending remittances to her.  Twemlow desired fervently to do his duty, and moreover the estrangement from his son increased his satisfaction in dealing handsomely with his daughter; the son would doubtless learn from the daughter how much he had lost by his impiety.  Seven years elapsed so, and then the parson gave up his holy calling and became a tea-blender in Brisbane.  Twemlow was shocked at this defection, which seemed to him sacrilegious, and a chance phrase in a letter of Alice’s requesting capital for the new venture—­a too assured demand, an insufficient gratitude for past benefits, Alice never quite knew what—­brought about a second breach in the Twemlow family.  The paternal purse was closed, and perhaps not too early, for the improvidence of the tea-blender and Alice’s fecundity were a gulf whose depth no munificence could have plumbed.  Again John Stanway sympathised with the now enfeebled old man.  John advised him to