“She’s a cat for showing it to you!” replied Miss Sparkes.  “That was wrote before we—­you know what.  It was after you’d took your ’ook that Sunday on the Embankment.  I didn’t mean it.  I was a bit cross.  I’ll pay her out some day for this, see if I don’t.”

Much more did Polly say, the gist of it all being an evident desire to soothe her companion’s feelings.  Gammon found himself in an unexpected and awkward position.  He had taken for granted an outbreak of violence, he had counted upon the opportunity of mutual invective, he wished to tell Polly to go further.  In the face of such singular mildness he was at a loss for weapons.  Mere brutality would soon have settled the matter, but of that Mr. Gammon was incapable.  At this juncture too, as if in support of Polly’s claim to indulgence, a strain, irresistible by heart of man, preluded a song of the affections.  Gammon began to understand what a mistake it was to have brought Polly to a music-hall for the purpose of breaking with her.  Under cover of the languishing lyric Miss Sparkes put her head nearer to him.

“What am I to do, eh?”

“To do?”

“I cawn’t go on like this.  Do you want me to get another job somewhere?  I sh’d think you might see I cawn’t wear this jacket much longer.”

The crisis was dreadful.  Gammon clutched at the only possible method of appeasing his conscience, and postponing decisive words he took Polly’s hand—­poorly gloved—­and secretly pressed the palm with a coin, which Polly in less than a clock-tick ascertained to be one pound sterling.  She smiled.  “What’s that for?”

“For—­for the present.”

And in this way another evening went by, leaving things as before.

“I’d never have believed I was such a fool,” said Gammon to himself at a late hour.  He meant, of course, that experience was teaching him for the first time the force of a moral obligation, which, as theorist, he had always held mere matter for joke.  He by no means prided himself on this newly-acquired perception; he saw it only as an obstacle to business-like behaviour.  But it was there, and—­by jorrocks! the outlook began to alarm him.

Meanwhile Mr. Greenacre was pursuing a laudable object.  Greatly pleased at the dexterity with which Miss Sparkes had been hoodwinked in the matter of Lord Polperro and her Uncle Clover, he determined to set all at rest in that direction by making Polly believe that Mr. Clover, her uncle himself as distinct from Lord Polperro, was also dead and gone and done for.  Gammon knew of the design and strongly favoured it, for he was annoyed by Mrs. Clover’s false position; he wished her to be proclaimed a widow, without the necessity of disagreeable revelations.

An exciting post card brought about one more interview between Miss Sparkes and the so-called private detective.  They met in a spot chosen for its impressiveness, the City office of a great line of ocean steamers.  When Polly had with some difficulty discovered the place and entered shyly she was met by Greenacre, who at once drew her aside and began talking in a whisper with much show of worry and perturbation.  In his hand rustled a printed form, with a few words in pencil.