Mr.
Flexen kept him dangling his heels in his office for three-quarters of an hour before he saw him.

This cold welcome allowed much of William Roper's sense of his great importance in the district to ooze out of him.
Mr.Flexen emptied him of the rest of it.

He greeted him curtly, heard his story with a deepening frown, and abused him at some length for a babbling idiot, and sent him about his business.

William Roper returned to his mother's cottage to find that her only object in life was to get him out of her cottage then and there.

She had conceived the idea that the whole affair was a plot to have a good excuse for giving her notice to leave that cottage.