H. de Vere Stacpoole and Margaret Stacpoole

“ Mr. Pettigrew has had a good lot of clothes lately, Mr. Meyer.”
“He has,” said Meyer with a twinkle in his eye. “Suits and suits—almost as if he were going to be married.”
“Married!” cried the other. “What put that into your head, Mr. Meyer? He's not a marrying man. Why, I've never seen him as much as glance an eye at a female.”
“Oh, it was only my joke,” said Meyer.
Now, in Mudd's soul there had lain for years an uneasiness, a crumpled rose-leaf of thought that touched him sometimes as he turned at night in bed. It was the fear that some day Simon might ruin Mudd's life with a mistress. ”

“ It was the third or fourth time he had given her these instructions.
“He's out of his mind,” said Mrs. Jukes, as she watched him go. She wasn't far wrong.
Mudd had been used to a rut, a rut forty years deep. His light and pleasant duties carried him easily through the day. Of evenings when Simon was dining out, he would join a social circle in the private room of a highly respectable tavern close by, smoke his pipe, drink two hot gins, and depart for home at ten-thirty. When Simon was in, he could smoke his pipe and read his paper in his own private room. ”

“ What's the matter with the man?” murmured the astonished housekeeper, as Mudd vanished. “Blest if he isn't getting as queer as his master.”
Out in the street, Mudd paused to blow his nose in a bandanna handkerchief just like Simon's. Then, as though this act had started his mechanism, off he went, hailed an omnibus in the next street, and got off at Charing Cross. He entered the Charing Cross Hotel.
“Is a Mr. Pettigrew here?” asked Mudd of the hall porter. ”