'Or a bit of fish,' said Meshach, gazing meditatively at the fire.

Hannah rose and interrogated his face. 'You ought to have told me
before, brother. It's past three now, and Saturday afternoon too!' So
saying, she hurried anxiously into the kitchen and told the servant to
put her hat on.

'Who is it that's coming, brother?' she inquired later, with timid,
ravenous curiosity.

'I see you'll have it out of me,' said Meshach, who gave up mysteries as
a miser parts with gold. 'It's Arthur Twemlow from New York; and let
that stop your mouth.'

Thus, with the utterance of this name in the prim, archaic, stuffy
little back-parlour, Meshach raised the curtain on the last act of a
drama which had slumbered for fifteen years, since the death of William
Twemlow, and which the principal actors in it had long thought to be
concluded or suppressed.

The whole matter could be traced back, through a series of situations
which had developed one out of another, to the character of old Twemlow;
but the final romantic solution was only rendered possible by the
peculiarities of Meshach Myatt. William Twemlow had been one of those
men in whom an unbridled appetite for virtue becomes a vice. He loved
God with such virulence that he killed his wife, drove his daughter into
a fatuous marriage, and quarrelled irrevocably with his son. The too
sensitive wife died for lack of joy; Alice escaped to Australia with a
parson who never accomplished anything but a large family; and Arthur,
at the age of seventeen, precociously cursed his father and sought in