Have you really seen anything of the lady ?" "Seen anything of her ?" echoed a journalist to whom Langholm had never spoken in his life.

"Why, can't you see that he bowled her out himself and came up straight to sell the news ?" Langholm took his comparative crony by the arm.
"Come in and dine with me," he said; "I can't stand this! Yes, yes, I know her well," he whispered, as they went round the screen which was the only partition between pipes and plates; "but let me see what that scurrilous rag has to say while you order.

I'll do the rest, and you had better make it a bottle of champagne." The "scurrilous rag" had less to say than Langholm had been led to expect.

He breathed again when he had read the sequence of short but pithy paragraphs.

Mrs.Minchin's new name was not given after all, nor that of her adopted district; while Langholm himself only slunk into print as "a well-known novelist who, oddly enough, was among the guests, and eye-witness of a situation after his own heart." The district might have been any one of the many manufacturing centres in "the largest of shires," which was the one geographical clew vouchsafed by the half-penny paper.