Mrs. Postwhistle sat on a Windsor-chair in the centre of Rolls Court.  Mrs. Postwhistle, who, in the days of her Hebehood, had been likened by admiring frequenters of the old Mitre in Chancery Lane to the ladies, somewhat , that an English artist, since become famous, was then commencing to popularise, had developed with the passing years, yet still retained a face of youthfulness.  The two facts, taken in conjunction, had resulted in an asset to her income not to be despised.  The wanderer through Rolls Court this summer’s afternoon, presuming him to be familiar with current , would have haunted by the sense that the restful-looking lady on the Windsor-chair was someone that he ought to know.  Glancing through almost any paper of the period, the problem would have been solved for him.  A photograph of Mrs. Postwhistle, taken quite recently, he would have encountered with this legend: “Before use of Professor Hardtop’s certain cure for corpulency.”  Beside it a photograph of Mrs. Postwhistle, then Arabella Higgins, taken twenty years ago, the legend slightly : “After use,” etc.  The face was the same, the figure—there was no denying it—had undergone .  
Mrs. Postwhistle had reached with her chair the centre of Rolls Court in course of following the sun.  The little shop, over the lintel of which ran: “Timothy Postwhistle, Grocer and Provision Merchant,” she had left behind her in the shadow.  Old inhabitants of St. Dunstan-in-the-West retained recollection of a gentlemanly figure, always in a very gorgeous waistcoat, with Dundreary whiskers, to be seen occasionally there behind the counter.  All customers it would refer, with the air of a Lord High Chamberlain introducing débutantes, to Mrs. Postwhistle, evidently regarding itself as .  For the last ten years, however, no one had noticed it there, and Mrs. Postwhistle had a facility amounting almost to genius for ignoring or misunderstanding questions it was not to her taste to answer.  Most things were suspected, nothing known.  St. Dunstan-in-the-West had turned to other problems.
 
“If I wasn’t wanting to see ’im,” remarked to herself Mrs. Postwhistle, who was knitting with one eye upon the shop, “’e’d a been ’ere ’fore I’d ’ad time to clear the dinner things away; certain to ’ave been.  It’s a strange world.”
 
Mrs. Postwhistle was desirous for the arrival of a gentleman not usually awaited with by the ladies of Rolls Court—to wit, one William Clodd, rent-collector, whose day for St. Dunstan-in-the-West was Tuesday.
 
“At last,” said Mrs. Postwhistle, though without hope that Mr. Clodd, who had just appeared at the other end of the court, could possibly hear her.  “Was beginning to be afraid as you’d tumbled over yerself in your ’urry and ’urt yerself.”
 
Mr. Clodd, perceiving Mrs. Postwhistle, decided to abandon method and take No. 7 first.
 
Mr. Clodd was a short, thick-set, bullet-headed young man, with ways that were , and eyes that, though kind, suggested .
 
“Ah!” said Mr. Clodd admiringly, as he pocketed the six half-crowns that the lady handed up to him.  “If only they were all like you, Mrs. Postwhistle!”
 
“Wouldn’t be no need of chaps like you to worry ’em,” out Mrs. Postwhistle.
 
“It’s an of fate, my being a rent-collector, when you come to think of it,” remarked Mr. Clodd, writing out the receipt.  “If I had my way, I’d put an end to landlordism, root and branch.  Curse of the country.”
 
“Just the very thing I wanted to talk to you about,” returned the lady—“that o’ mine.”
 
“Ah! don’t pay, don’t he?  You just hand him over to me.  I’ll soon have it out of him.”
 
“It’s not that,” explained Mrs. Postwhistle.  “If a Saturday morning ’appened to come round as ’e didn’t pay up without me asking, I should know I’d made a mistake—that it must be Friday.  If I don’t ’appen to be in at ’alf-past ten, ’e puts it in an envelope and leaves it on the table.”
 
“Wonder if his mother has got any more like him?” Mr. Clodd.  “Could do with a few about this neighbourhood.  What is it you want to say about him, then?  Merely to about him?”
 
“I wanted to ask you,” continued Mrs. Postwhistle, “’ow I could get rid of ’im.  It was rather a curious agreement.”
 
“Why do you want to get rid of him?  Too noisy?”
 
“Noisy!  Why, the cat makes more noise about the ’ouse than ’e does.  ’E’d make ’is fortune as a burglar.”
 “Come home late?”
 
“Never known ’im out after the are up.”
 
“Gives you too much trouble then?”
 
“I can’t say that of ’im.  Never know whether ’e’s in the ’ouse or isn’t, without going upstairs and knocking at the door.”
 
“Here, you tell it your own way,” suggested the bewildered Clodd.  “If it was anyone else but you, I should say you didn’t know your own business.”
 
“’E gets on my nerves,” said Mrs. Postwhistle.  “You ain’t in a ’urry for five minutes?”
 
Mr. Clodd was always in a hurry.  “But I can forget it talking to you,” added the Mr. Clodd.
 
Mrs. Postwhistle led the way into the little parlour.
 
“Just the name of it,” consented Mr. Clodd.  “Cheerfulness combined with temperance; that’s the ideal.”
 
“I’ll tell you what ’appened only last night,” commenced Mrs. Postwhistle, seating herself the opposite side of the loo-table.  “A letter came for ’im by the seven o’clock post.  I’d seen ’im go out two hours before, and though I’d been sitting in the shop the whole blessed time, I never saw or ’eard ’im pass through.  E’s like that.  It’s like ’aving a ghost for a lodger.  I opened ’is door without knocking and went in.  If you’ll believe me, ’e was clinging with ’is arms and legs to the top of the bedstead—it’s one of those old-fashioned, four-post things—’is ’ead the ceiling.  ’E ’adn’t got too much clothes on, and was cracking nuts with ’is teeth and eating ’em.  ’E threw a ’andful of shells at me, and making the most awful faces at me, started off gibbering softly to himself.”
 
“All play, I suppose?  No real ?” commented the interested Mr. Clodd.
 
“It will go on for a week, that will,” continued Mrs. Postwhistle—“’e fancying ’imself a monkey.  Last week he was a tortoise, and was crawling about on his stomach with a tea-tray tied on to ’is back.  ’E’s as sensible as most men, if that’s saying much, the moment ’e’s outside the front door; but in the ’ouse—well, I suppose the fact is that ’e’s a lunatic.”
 
“Don’t seem no hiding anything from you,” Mrs. Postwhistle remarked Mr. Clodd in tones of .  “Does he ever get violent?”
 
“Don’t know what ’e would be like if ’e ’appened to fancy ’imself something really dangerous,” answered Mrs. Postwhistle.  “I am a bit nervous of this new monkey game, I don’t mind confessing to you—the things that they do according to the picture-books.  Up to now, except for imagining ’imself a , and taking all his meals the carpet, it’s been mostly birds and cats and ’armless sort o’ things I ’aven’t seemed to mind so much.”

Few are the ways of the West Central district that have changed less within the last half-century than Nevill’s Court, leading from Great New Street into Lane.  Its north side still consists of the same row of small low shops that stood there—doing perhaps a little brisker business—when George the Fourth was King; its southern side of the same three substantial houses each behind a strip of garden, pleasant by contrast with surrounding grimness, built long ago—some say before Queen Anne was dead.
 
Out of the largest of these, passing through the garden, then well cared for, came one sunny Sunday morning, some fifteen years before the commencement proper of this story, one Solomon Appleyard, pushing in front of him a perambulator.  At the brick wall by wooden railings that divides the garden from the court, Solomon paused, hearing behind him the voice of Mrs. Appleyard speaking from the doorstep.
 
“If I don’t see you again until dinner-time, I’ll try and get on without you, understand.  Don’t think of nothing but your pipe and forget the child.  And be careful of the crossings.”
 
Mrs. Appleyard retired into the darkness.  Solomon, the perambulator carefully, emerged from Nevill’s Court without accident.  The quiet streets drew Solomon .  A vacant seat beneath the shade overlooking the Long Water in Kensington Gardens invited to rest.
 
“Piper?” suggested a small boy to Solomon.  “Sunday Times, ’Server?”
 
“My boy,” said Mr. Appleyard, speaking slowly, “when you’ve been mewed up with newspapers eighteen hours a day for six days a week, you can do without ’em for a morning.  Take ’em away.  I want to forget the smell of ’em.”
 
Solomon, having assured himself that the party in the perambulator was still breathing, crossed his legs and lit his pipe.
 
“Hezekiah!”
 
The had been from Solomon Appleyard by the approach of a , short man clad in a ill-fitting broad-cloth suit.
 
“What, Sol, my boy?”
 
“It looked like you,” said Solomon.  “And then I said to myself: ‘No; surely it can’t be Hezekiah; he’ll be at .’”
 
“You run about,” said Hezekiah, addressing a youth of some four summers he had been leading by the hand.  “Don’t you go out of my sight; and whatever you do, don’t you do injury to those new clothes of yours, or you’ll wish you’d never been put into them.  The truth is,” continued Hezekiah to his friend, his sole surviving son and heir being out of earshot, “the morning me.  ’Tain’t often I get a bit of fresh air.”
 
“Doing well?”
 
“The business,” replied Hezekiah, “is going up by leaps and bounds—leaps and bounds.  But, of course, all that means harder work for me.  It’s from six in the morning till twelve o’clock at night.”
 
“There’s nothing I know of,” returned Solomon, who was something of a , “that’s given away free for nothing except misfortune.”
 
“Keeping yourself up to the mark ain’t too easy,” continued Hezekiah; “and when it comes to other folks! play’s all they think of.  Talk religion to them—why, they laugh at you!  What the world’s coming to, I don’t know.  How’s the printing business doing?”
 
“The printing business,” responded the other, removing his pipe and speaking somewhat sadly, “the printing business looks like being a big thing.  Capital, of course, is what me—or, rather, the want of it.  But Janet, she’s careful; she don’t waste much, Janet don’t.”
 
“Now, with Anne,” replied Hezekiah, “it’s all the other way—pleasure, gaiety, a day at Rosherville or the Crystal Palace—anything to waste money.”
 
“Ah! she was always fond of her bit of fun,” remembered Solomon.
 
“Fun!” retorted Hezekiah.  “I like a bit of fun myself.  But not if you’ve got to pay for it.  Where’s the fun in that?”
 
“What I ask myself sometimes,” said Solomon, looking straight in front of him, “is what do we do it for?”
 
“What do we do what for?”
 
“Work like blessed slaves, depriving ourselves of all .  What’s the sense of it?  What—”
 
A voice from the perambulator beside him broke the thread of Solomon Appleyard’s .  The sole surviving son of Hezekiah Grindley, seeking and finding none, had crept back unperceived.  A perambulator!  A thing his experience told him out of which excitement in some form or another could generally be obtained.  You worried it and took your chance.  Either it howled, in which case you had to run for your life, followed—and, unfortunately, overtaken nine times out of ten—by a whirlwind of ; or it gurgled: in which case the heavens smiled and halos on your head.  In either event you escaped the deadly that is the result of continuous .  Master Grindley, his star having pointed out to him a peacock’s feather lying on the ground, had, with one eye upon his unobservant parent, removed the complicated coverings sheltering Miss Helvetia Appleyard from the world, and anticipating by a quarter of a century the prime of British youth, had set to work to that lady on the nose.  Miss Helvetia Appleyard , did what the British of to-day may be relied upon to do under corresponding circumstances: she first of all took swift and comprehensive survey of the male thing behind the feather.  Had he been in her eyes, she would, one may rely upon it, have anteceded the behaviour in similar case of her descendant of to-day—that is to say, have expressed in no uncertain terms.  Master Nathaniel Grindley proving, however, to her taste, that which might have been considered impertinence became accepted as a fit and proper form of introduction.  Miss Appleyard smiled graciously—nay, further, intimated desire for more.
 
“That your only one?” asked the Grindley.
 
“She’s the only one,” replied Solomon, speaking in tones less pessimistic.
 
Miss Appleyard had with the help of Grindley junior herself into a sitting .  Grindley junior continued his attentions, the lady indicating by signs the various points at which she was most .
 
“Pretty picture they make together, eh?” suggested Hezekiah in a whisper to his friend.
 
“Never saw her take to anyone like that before,” returned Solomon, likewise in a whisper.
 
A neighbouring church clock chimed twelve.  Solomon Appleyard, knocking the ashes from his pipe, arose.
 
“Don’t know any reason myself why we shouldn’t see a little more of one another than we do,” suggested Grindley senior, shaking hands.
 
“Give us a look-up one Sunday afternoon,” suggested Solomon.  “Bring the youngster with you.”
 
Solomon Appleyard and Hezekiah Grindley had started life within a few months of one another some five-and-thirty years before.  Likewise within a few hundred yards of one another, Solomon at his father’s bookselling and printing establishment on the east side of the High Street of a small Yorkshire town; Hezekiah at his father’s grocery shop upon the west side, opposite.  Both had married farmers’ daughters.  Solomon’s natural towards gaiety Fate had corrected by directing his affections to a partner instinct with Yorkshire shrewdness; and with shrewdness go other qualities that make for success rather than for happiness.  Hezekiah, had circumstances been equal, might have been his friend’s rival for Janet’s capable and saving hand, had not sweet-tempered, laughing Annie Glossop—directed by to her moral welfare, one must presume—fallen in love with him.  Between Jane’s and Annie’s three hundred golden sovereigns Hezekiah had not hesitated a moment.  Golden sovereigns were solid facts; wifely virtues, by a serious-minded and strong-willed husband, could be instilled—at all events, light-heartedness suppressed.  The two men, Hezekiah urged by his own ambition, Solomon by his wife’s, had arrived in London within a year of one another: Hezekiah to open a grocer’s shop in Kensington, which those who should have known assured him was a hopeless neighbourhood.  But Hezekiah had the instinct of the money-maker.  Solomon, after looking about him, had upon the roomy, substantial house in Nevill’s Court as a foundation for a printer’s business.
 
That was ten years ago.  The two friends, scorning delights, living days, had seen but little of one another.  Light-hearted Annie had borne to her partner two children who had died.  Nathaniel George, with the luck supposed to wait on number three, had lived on, and, inheriting fortunately the of his mother, had brought sunshine into the gloomy rooms above the shop in High Street, Kensington.  Mrs. Grindley, grown weak and fretful, had rested from her labours.
 
Mrs. Appleyard’s angel, like his protégé, had waited till Solomon’s business was well established before despatching the to Nevill’s Court, with a little girl.  Later had sent a boy, who, not finding the close air of St. Dunstan to his , had found his way back again; thus passing out of this story and all others.  And there remained to carry on the legend of the Grindleys and the Appleyards only Nathaniel George, now five, and Janet Helvetia, quite a beginner, who took lift seriously.
 
There are no such things as facts.  Narrow-minded folk—surveyors, auctioneers, and such like—would have insisted that the garden between the old Georgian house and Nevill’s Court was a strip of land one hundred and eighteen feet by ninety-two, containing a laburnum tree, six laurel bushes, and a deodora.  To Nathaniel George and Janet Helvetia it was the land of Thule, “the furthest boundaries of which no man has reached.”  On rainy Sunday afternoons they played in the great, gloomy pressroom, where silent ogres, motionless, stretched out iron arms to seize them as they ran.  Then just when Nathaniel George was eight, and Janet Helvetia four and a half, Hezekiah launched the “Grindley’s Sauce.”  It added a to chops and steaks, transformed cold mutton into a luxury, and the head of Hezekiah Grindley—which was big enough in all conscience as it was—and shrivelled up his little hard heart.  The Grindleys and the Appleyards visited no more.  As a sensible fellow ought to have seen for himself, so thought Hezekiah, the Sauce had altered all things.  The possibility of a marriage between their children, things having remained equal, might have been a pretty fancy; but the son of the great Grindley, whose name in three-foot letters faced the world from every , would have to look higher than a printer’s daughter.  Solomon, a sudden and convert to the principles of mediæval feudalism, would rather see his only child, granddaughter of the author of The History of Kettlewell and other works, dead and buried than married to a grocer’s son, even though he might inherit a fortune made out of poisoning the public with a mixture of mustard and sour beer.  It was many years before Nathaniel George and Janet Helvetia met one another again, and when they did they had forgotten one another.
 
Hezekiah S. Grindley, a short, stout, and gentleman, sat under a palm in the gorgeously furnished drawing-room of his big house at Notting Hill.  Mrs. Grindley, a thin, faded woman, the despair of her dressmaker, sat as near to the fire as its massive and outworks would permit, and shivered.  Grindley junior, a fair-haired, well-shaped youth, with eyes that the other sex found attractive, leant with his hands in his pockets against a robed statue of Diana, and appeared uncomfortable.
 
“I’m making the money—making it hand over fist.  All you’ll have to do will be to spend it,” Grindley senior was explaining to his son and heir.
 
“I’ll do that all right, dad.”
 
“I’m not so sure of it,” was his father’s opinion.  “You’ve got to prove yourself to spend it.  Don’t you think I shall be content to have slaved all these years merely to provide a brainless young idiot with the means of self-indulgence.  I leave my money to somebody worthy of me.  Understand, sir?—somebody worthy of me.”
 
Mrs. Grindley commenced a sentence; Mr. Grindley turned his small eyes upon her.  The sentence remained unfinished.
 
“You were about to say something,” her husband reminded her.
 
Mrs. Grindley said it was nothing.
 
“If it is anything worth hearing—if it is anything that will assist the discussion, let’s have it.”  Mr. Grindley waited.  “If not, if you yourself do not consider it worth finishing, why have begun it?”
 
Mr. Grindley returned to his son and heir.  “You haven’t done too well at school—in fact, your school career has disappointed me.”
 
“I know I’m not clever,” Grindley junior offered as an excuse.
 
“Why not?  Why aren’t you clever?”
 
His son and heir was unable to explain.
 
“You are my son—why aren’t you clever?  It’s laziness, sir; sheer laziness!”
 
“I’ll try and do better at , sir—honour bright I will!”
 
“You had better,” advised him his father; “because I warn you, your whole future depends upon it.  You know me.  You’ve got to be a credit to me, to be worthy of the name of Grindley—or the name, my boy, is all you’ll have.”
 
Old Grindley meant it, and his son knew that he meant it.  The old Puritan principles and instincts were strong in the old gentleman—formed, perhaps, the better part of him.  Idleness was an abomination to him; devotion to pleasure, other than the pleasure of money-making, a grievous sin in his eyes.  Grindley junior intended to do well at Oxford, and might have succeeded.  In accusing himself of lack of cleverness, he did himself an .  He had brains, he had energy, he had character.  Our virtues can be our stumbling-blocks as well as our .  Young Grindley had one admirable virtue that needs, above all others, careful controlling: he was itself.  Before the charm and sweetness of it, Oxford went down.  The Sauce, against the earnest counsel of its own advertisement, was forgotten; the passed by.  To escape the natural result of his popularity would have needed a stronger will than young Grindley .  For a time the true state of affairs was hidden from the eye of Grindley senior.  To “slack” it this term, with the full determination of “swotting” it the next, is always easy; the difficulty beginning only with the new term.  Possibly with luck young Grindley might have his position and covered up the traces of his , but for an unfortunate accident.  Returning to college with some other choice spirits at two o’clock in the morning, it occurred to young Grindley that trouble might be saved all round by cutting out a of glass with a diamond ring and entering his rooms, which were on the ground-floor, by the window.  That, in mistake for his own, he should have selected the bedroom of the College Rector was a misfortune that might have occurred to anyone who had commenced the evening on and finished it on whisky.  Young Grindley, having been warned already twice before, was “sent down.”  And then, of course, the whole history of the three wasted years came out.  Old Grindley in his study chair having talked for half an hour at the top of his voice, chose, partly by reason of physical necessity, partly by reason of dramatic instinct, to speak quietly and slowly.
 
“I’ll give you one chance more, my boy, and one only.  I’ve tried you as a gentleman—perhaps that was my mistake.  Now I’ll try you as a grocer.”
 
“As a what?”
 
“As a grocer, sir—g-r-o-c-e-r—grocer, a man who stands behind a counter in a white and his shirt-sleeves; who sells tea and sugar and candied peel and such-like things to customers—old ladies, little girls; who rises at six in the morning, takes down the shutters, sweeps out the shop, cleans the windows; who has half an hour for his dinner of corned beef and bread; who puts up the shutters at ten o’clock at night, tidies up the shop, has his supper, and goes to bed, feeling his day has not been wasted.  I meant to spare you.  I was wrong.  You shall go through the mill as I went through it.  If at the end of two years you’ve done well with your time, learned something—learned to be a man, at all events—you can come to me and thank me.”
 
“I’m afraid, sir,” suggested Grindley junior, whose handsome face during the last few minutes had grown very white, “I might not make a very satisfactory grocer.  You see, sir, I’ve had no experience.”
 
“I am glad you have some sense,” returned his father drily.  “You are quite right.  Even a grocer’s business requires learning.  It will cost me a little money; but it will be the last I shall ever spend upon you.  For the first year you will have to be , and I shall allow you something to live on.  It shall be more than I had at your age—we’ll say a pound a week.  After that I shall expect you to keep yourself.”
 
Grindley senior rose.  “You need not give me your answer till the evening.  You are of age.  I have no control over you unless you are willing to agree.  You can go my way, or you can go your own.”
 
Young Grindley, who had inherited a good deal of his father’s , felt very much inclined to go his own; but, on the other hand by the sweetness of he had inherited from his mother, was unable to withstand the argument of that lady’s tears, so that evening accepted old Grindley’s terms, asking only as a favour that the scene of his might be in some out-of-the-way neighbourhood where there would be little chance of his being met by old friends.
 
“I have thought of all that,” answered his father.  “My object isn’t to you more than is necessary for your good.  The shop I have already selected, on the assumption that you would submit, is as quiet and out-of-the-way as you could wish.  It is in a turning off Fetter Lane, where you’ll see few other people than printers and caretakers.  You’ll with a woman, a Mr............