Hannah and the servant cleared the tea-table, and the two men were left alone, each silently reducing an J.S.  Murias to ashes.  Meshach seemed to grow smaller in his padded chair by the hob, to become torpid, and to lose that keen sense of his own astuteness which alone gave zest to his life.  Arthur stared out of the window at the confined backyard.  The autumn dusk thickened.

Suddenly Meshach sprang up and lighted the gas, and as he adjusted the height of the flame, he remarked casually:  ’So your sister Alice is as poorly off as ever?’

Twemlow assented with a nod.  ‘By the way,’ he said, ’you told me on Wednesday you had something interesting to show me.’

Meshach made no answer, but picked up the poker and struck several times a large pewter platter on the mantelpiece.

‘Do you want anything, brother?’ said Hannah, hastening into the room.

’Go up into my bedroom, sister, and in the left-hand pigeon-hole in the bureau you’ll see a little flat tissue-paper parcel.  Bring it me.  It’s marked J.S.’

‘Yes, brother,’ and she departed.

’You said as your father had told your sister as he never got no more than two hundred a year from th’ partnership after he retired.’

‘Yes,’ Twemlow replied.  ’That’s what she wrote me.  In fact she sent me the old chap’s letter to read.  So I reckoned it cost him most all he got to live.’

‘Well,’ the old man said, and Hannah returned with the parcel, which he carefully unwrapped.  ‘That’ll do, sister.’  Hannah disappeared.  ‘Sithee!’ He mysteriously drew Arthur’s attention to a little green book whose cover still showed traces of mud and water.

‘And what’s this?’ Twemlow asked with assumed lightness.

Meshach gave him the history of his adventure at the fire, and then laboriously displayed and expounded the contents of the book, peering into the yellow pages through the steel-rimmed spectacles which he had put on for the purpose.

‘And you’ve kept it all this time?’ said Twemlow.

‘I’ve kept it,’ answered the old man grimly, and Twemlow felt that that was precisely what Meshach Myatt might have been expected to do.

‘See,’ said Meshach, and their heads were close together,’ that’s the year before your father’s death—­eight hundred and ninety-two pounds.  And year afore that—­one thousand two hundred and seven pounds.  And year afore that—­bless us!  Have I turned o’er two pages at once?’ And so he continued.

Twemlow’s heart began to beat heavily as Meshach’s eyes met his.  He seemed to see his father as a pathetic cheated simpleton, and to hear the innumerable children of his sister crying for food; he remembered that in the old Bursley days he had always distrusted John Stanway, that conceited fussy imposing young man of twenty-two whom his father had taken into partnership and utterly believed in.  He forgot that he had hated his father, and his mind was obsessed by a sentimental and pure passion for justice.