I then very briefly, but with all essential details, described my encounter with Mr. Maidstone, concluding with the numbers of the two constables and a surmise that he was being detained to see the magistrate. When I had finished, Mr. Chrysostom was breathing heavily, while Mr. Cake was engaged in silent prayer. Then they both rose and stood with their backs to the trousers while Mr. Chrysostom gave his orders. “Miss Botterill,” he said, “when Mr. Maidstone arrives, you will please request him to come to my room. Mr. Carp, having removed your trousers, you will kindly take charge of the show-room.” Colouring deeply, Mr. Cake touched him on the arm. “I suppose you refer,” he said, “to the trousers on the counter.” “Eh, what?” said Mr. Chrysostom. “Yes, yes, of course. The trousers on the counter. You didn’t suppose——?” “I endeavoured not to,” said Mr. Cake. “But perhaps it would have been better to be more explicit.” Slightly ruffled, however, as was the eminent novelist by the occasion and manner of his reception, he was completely emphatic, as he afterwards assured me, on the necessity for dismissing Mr. Maidstone; and indeed Mr. Chrysostom, as he also informed me, had needed very little in the way of persuasion. “In fact, I think I may say,” he said, a couple of hours later, as he passed through the show-room on his way to the street, “that _Gnashers of Teeth_ will find a good friend in Mr. Maidstone’s successor.” I clasped his hand. “I sincerely hope so,” I said. “It’s even more powerful,” he said, “than _Without are Dogs_.” It was in this fashion then that I became show-room manager with an added, though insufficient emolument, for Mr. Maidstone, when he arrived the next morning, was at once dismissed after a brief interview. Explaining at first that he had failed to attend owing to a very violent bilious headache, he was of course unable, when pressed by Mr. Chrysostom, to deny the truth of my allegations; and it subsequently emerged that, after a night in the police station, he had been fined ten shillings by the local magistrate. Nor did his resentment, when he came downstairs again, assume the physical character that I had feared, although I had taken the precaution of keeping Miss Botterill beside me and holding my police whistle in my left hand. On the contrary, he seemed to recognize not only the grossness of his delinquency, but the inevitable nature of the consequences that had so rightly ensued. “Well, you’ve done me in, laddie,” he said. “But I suppose I deserved it.” “I regret to say,” I replied, “that there can be no doubt of it.” “But it’s going to be hard,” he added, “on the wife and family.” “The wages of sin,” I said, “are never easy.”