That Mr. Theodore Shelf had made his own exit and brought about his wife’s social downfall most dramatically, even the worst-hit of his victims could not but admit. The police, with exquisite trouble, had traced him to Paddington Station, and found that he had taken a first-class ticket to Liverpool; and, after using the wires, they returned to bed with the firm conviction that their seaport associates would meet the gentleman at Lime Street. Of course they could not possibly guess that he and a wire-haired fox-terrier dog had changed their route to Monmouthshire, and had arrived in Newport in ample time to go on board one of the Oceanic Steam Transport Company’s boats, which had just finished coaling there. The police and the victims said a good many things when they learnt the simple means by which Mr. Shelf had escaped, and they confidently expected never to see him again in this world, and hoped to miss him in the next. Of all creation, the newspaper proprietors alone blessed the man, in that he had sent up their circulation with a bounce and a bound. But even they did not show due gratitude. They dissected his doings with all the cruelty that ink is capable of, and made derisive comments on his Christian name. They found no excuse for him; no tittle of good in all his prodigious enterprises. They painted him black all over, inside and out, and Great Britain set back its shoulders and howled with upright wrath over the picture. They published chartered accountants’ certificates of their sales, and sold their journals to companies on the strength of the figures, and thanked Heaven in print that they had never gone so low as to receive benefit from Theodore Shelf. It was only in private that they rubbed their hands complacently, and spoke of him as a journalist’s gold-mine. Perhaps this may not strike one as entirely fair; but it was eminently business-like; and, as a commercial man himself, Mr. Shelf should have been the last to condemn it. He did though, for all that. Indeed, circumstances combined to modify his views on many matters after his exit from polite society. CHAPTER XXIII. DECISIONS. When Onslow arrived back at the _Port Edes_ from Point Sebastian he found Captain Kettle sitting in the chart-house, with a pen gripped between his teeth and a rhyming dictionary in his hands surrendering its reluctant treasures. On the mahogany desk in front of him was a sheet of much-corrected manuscript, with a capital letter at the commencement of every line; and beyond, in a jam-pot, was a bunch of waxen-leaved magnolia flowers, with two coral-pink magnolia cones, set around with a frill of sheeny leaves.