“If I’d been half a man I should have left.  They’d have taken me on at Simpkin’s, I know they would, or at the Old City Chop House, if I’d waited for a vacancy.  Who’d take me on now?  Why, they’d throw it in my face that I came from Chaffey’s, and I shouldn’t have half a word to say for myself.”

It was very seldom that he received a written invitation from his sister-in-law, but he heard from her in these hot days of June that she particularly wished to see him as soon as possible.  The message he thought, must have some reference to Mrs. Clover’s husband, whose reappearance at any moment would have been no great surprise, even after an absence of six years.  Mr. Sparkes had a strong objection to mysterious persons; he was all for peace and comfort in a familiar routine, and for his own part had often hoped that the man Clover was by this time dead and buried.  Responding as soon as possible to Mrs. Clover’s summons, he found that she wished to speak to him about his daughter.  Mrs. Clover showed herself seriously disturbed by Polly’s recent behaviour; she told of the newly-acquired jewellery, of the dresses in which Miss Sparkes went “flaunting,” of the girl’s scornful refusal to answer natural inquiries.

“The long and the short of it is, Ebenezer, you ought to see her, and find out what’s going on.  There may be nothing wrong, and I don’t say there is; but that watch and chain of hers wasn’t bought under twenty pounds—­that I’ll answer for, and it’s a very queer thing, to say the least of it.  What business was it of mine. she asked.  I shouldn’t wonder if she says the same to you; but it’s your plain duty to have a talk with her, don’t you think so now?”

To have a talk with Polly, especially on such a subject, was no easy or pleasant undertaking for Mr. Sparkes, who had so long resigned all semblance of parental authority.  But as a conscientious man he could not stand aside when his only surviving daughter seemed in peril.  After an exchange of post cards a meeting took place between them on the Embankment below Waterloo Bridge, for neither father nor child had anything in the nature of a home beyond the indispensable bedroom, and their only chance of privacy was in the open air.  Having no desire to quarrel with her parent (it would have been so very one-sided and uninspiriting) Polly began in a conciliatory tone.

“Aunt Louisa’s been making a bother, has she?  Just like her.  Don’t you listen to her fussicking, dad.  What’s all the row about?  I’ve had a present given to me; well, what of that?  You can look at it for yourself.  I can’t tell you who give it me, ’cos I’ve promised I wouldn’t; but you’ll know some day, and then you’ll larff.  It ain’t nothing to fret your gizzard about; so there.  I’m old enough to look after myself, and if I ain’t I never shall be; so there.”

This did not satisfy Mr. Sparkes.  He saw that the watch and chain were certainly valuable, and he could not imagine how the girl had become honourably possessed of them, save as the gift of an admirer; but the mere fact of such an admirer’s exacting secrecy implied a situation of danger.