the death of old Twemlow and the misappropriation of the little book, Meshach encountered Arthur Twemlow himself; Meshach was returning from his autumn holiday in the Isle of Man, and Arthur had just landed from the ‘Servia.’  The two men were mutually impressed by each other’s skill in nicely conducting an interview which ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have botched; for they had last met as boy of seventeen and man of forty.  They lunched richly at the Adelphi, and gave news for news.  Arthur’s buyer, it seemed, was dead, and after a day or two in London Arthur was coming to the Five Towns to buy a little in person.  Meshach inquired about Alice in Australia, and was told that things were in a specially bad way with the tea-blender.  He said that you couldn’t cure a fool, and remarked casually upon the smallness of the amount left by old Twemlow.  Arthur, unaware that Meshach Myatt was raising up an idea which for fifteen years had been buried but never forgotten in his mind, answered with nonchalance that the amount certainly was rather small.  Arthur added that in his dying letter of forgiveness to Alice the old man had stated that his income from the works during the last years of his life had been less than two hundred per annum.  Meshach worked his shut thin lips up and down and then began to discuss other matters.  But as they parted at Lime Street Station the observer of life said to Arthur with presaging calm:  ‘You’ll be i’ th’ Five Towns at the end of the week.  Come and have a cup o’ tea with me and Hannah on Saturday afternoon.  The old spot, you know it, top of Church Street.  I’ve something to show you as ‘ll interest you.’  There was a pause and an interchange of glances.  ‘Right!’ said Arthur Twemlow.  ’Thank you!  I’ll be there at a quarter after four or thereabouts.’  ’It’s like as if what must be!’ Meshach murmured to himself with almost sad resignation, in the enigmatic idiom of the Five Towns.  But he was highly pleased that he, the first of all the townsfolk, should have seen Arthur Twemlow after twenty-five years’ absence.

When Hannah, in silk, met the most interesting and disconcerting American stranger in the lobby, the sound and the smell of Bursley sausage frizzling in the kitchen added a warm finish to her confused welcome.  She remembered him perfectly, ‘Eh!  Mr. Arthur,’ she said, ’I remember you that well....’  And that was all she could say, except:  ‘Now take off your overcoat and do make yourself at home, Mr. Arthur.’

‘I guess I know you,’ said Twemlow, touched by the girlish shyness, the primeval innocence, and the passionate hospitality of the little grey-haired thing.

As he took off his glossy blue overcoat and hung it up he seemed to fill the narrow lobby with his large frame and his quiet but penetrating attractive American accent.  He probably weighed fourteen stone, but the elegance of his suit and his boots, the clean-shaven chin, the fineness of the lines of the nose, and the alert eyes set back under the temples, redeemed him from grossness.  He looked under rather than over forty; his brown hair was beginning to recede from the forehead, but the heavy moustache, which entirely hid his mouth and was austerely trimmed at the sides, might have aroused the envy of a colonel of hussars.