In the small, untidy, disagreeable, malodorous shop, which in about half a century had scarcely altered its aspect, Thomas Batchgrew directed Rachel to a corner behind the counter and behind a partition, with a view of a fragment of the window.  As she passed she saw one of the Batchgrew women (the wife of another grandson) and three little girls of various sizes flash in succession across an open doorway at the back.  The granddaughter-in-law, who had an abode full of costly wedding-presents over the shop, had been one of her callers, but when they flashed across that doorway the Batchgrew women made a point of ignoring all phenomena in the shop.

“Has Louis decided about them debentures?” Thomas Batchgrew asked, still in a very low and confidential tone, as the two stood together in the corner.  He had put the Book and the parcel down on a very ragged blotting-pad that lay on a chipped and ink-stained deal desk, and began to finger a yellow penholder.  There was nobody else in the shop.

Rachel had foreseen his question.

She answered calmly:  “Yes.  He’s quite decided that on the whole it’ll be better if he doesn’t put his money into debentures.”

There was no foundation whatever for this statement; yet, in uttering the lie, she was clearly conscious of a feeling of lofty righteousness.  She faced Thomas Batchgrew, though not with a tranquillity perfectly maintained, and she still enjoyed his appreciation of her, but she did not seem to care whether he guessed that she was lying or not.

“I’m sorry, lass!” he said simply, sniffing.  “The lad’s a fool.  It isn’t as if I’ve got to go hawking seven per cent. debentures to get rid of ’em—­and in a concern like that, too!  They’d never ha’ been seven per cent if it hadna been for me.  But it was you as I was thinking of when I offered ’em to Louis.  I thought I should be doing ye a good turn.”

The old man smiled amid his loud sniffs.  He was too old to have retained any save an artistic interest in women.  But an artistic interest in them he certainly had; and at an earlier period he had acquainted himself with life, as his eye showed.  Rachel blushed a third time that morning, and more deeply than before.  He was seriously nattering her now.  Endearing qualities that had expired in him long ago seemed to be resuscitated and to animate his ruined features.  Rachel dimly understood how it was that some woman had once married him and borne him a lot of children, and how it was that he had been so intimate and valued a friend of the revered husband of such a woman as Mrs. Maldon.  She was, in the Five Towns phrase, “flustered.”  She almost believed what Thomas Batchgrew had said.  She did believe it.  She had misjudged him on the Thursday night when he spread the lure of the seven per cent. in front of Louis.  At any rate, he assuredly did not care, personally, whether Louis accepted the debentures or not.

“However,” the councillor went on, “he’s got to know his own business best.  And I don’t know as it’s any affair o’ mine.  But I was just thinking of you.  When the husband has a good investment, th’ wife generally comes in for something....  And what’s more, it ‘ud ha’ stopped him from doing anything silly with his brass! You know.”