Erb walked back to his office feeling that the talk had done good. It was certainly a great thing to find himself more hopeful in regard to Louisa. But he composed on the way a bitter, bitter paragraph concerning the firm in Neckinger Road and its occupation. This seemed so excellent, that he had half a mind to turn it into poetry, but there proved to be some difficulty in finding rhymes for “murder” and for “dastardly,” and he allowed himself on arrival to write it in prose. The copy for number three being made up, he deleted a humorous paragraph about a Bricklayers’ Arms man, whose wife had run away, and this made room. There was much in the lines themselves; more to be read by those who could fill up the blank spaces intervening. Erb looked at it when he had crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s with the pride of a man who, with a mere dip of ink, could force monied folk to tremble. A fine thing to have control in this way over the printed word. All the more satisfactory to get on a grievance, which appeared to be solid, in that he eventually found that he had to step out apologetically from the corner into which Spanswick’s ingenuity had thrust him. There were, it appeared, no grounds whatever for the statement made, and in Featherstone Buildings, Holborn, in a dim office with one light, under which he had to sit, whilst the two partners of the legal firm remained at the other end of the table in the shadow, he underwent, perhaps, the very worst quarter of an hour that he had endured since the time of schooldays. He had had to wait some time whilst one partner was sent for by the other. “Then we may take it, Mr. Barnes, that you withdraw unreservedly every word of the paragraph in question?” “That is so.” “And you are prepared to offer every apology and every recompense that is in your power?” asked the other partner. “I don’t know,” said Erb, “about recompense.” “Well, then, every apology?” “I suppose I shall have to taste blacking,” he said. The two partners conferred for a long time in an undertone, the while Erb played nervously with a paper-knife. When one of them spoke he held his breath. “If the paragraph had been copied into other journals, if it had had a wider circulation than that given by your little paper, Mr. Barnes, our client would have instructed us to go on with the legal proceedings, and we should have asked for and obtained heavy damages. If the journal itself was not below contempt—” “Look here!” interrupted Erb sharply, “don’t you go rubbing it in too thick.” “Sir William is a man with a large heart,” said the other partner, taking up a more conciliatory tone, “and we shall advise him in the circumstances to do the generous thing. You will print in the next issue of your paper an apology?” “A most humble apology,” remarked the other partner, “terms of which you will permit us to dictate to you. He will not ask you to pay the costs already incurred, and you must think yourself confoundedly—”