The shop opened promptly on the first morning, Mr. Richards wearing a silk hat as he took down the shutters, to indicate that shirt-sleeves did not mean inferiority. He nodded distantly to his neighbours, and when they asked him a question concerning the weather of the day shook his head reservedly to convey the idea that he had not yet decided the point. Inside, he arranged the cash-drawer neatly and prepared change, blew a speck of dust from the counter, and, replacing the silk hat with a grey tweed cap, lighted a pipe and waited for the rush of custom. A drawback of official life had consisted in the fact that one could not be seen smoking within a certain distance of the terminus; it had been his duty on many occasions to reprove the staff for indulging in a pipe at the wrong moment, or at the inappropriate place; the match which he struck on the sole of his slippers made a bright flaming signal of the inauguration of liberty. During the morning Mr. Richards struck many matches and smoked several pipes, so that at one o’clock when his daughter called out respectfully, “Dinner’s ready, father!” his appetite was not so good as, at this hour, it should have been. “What sort of a morning has it been, father?” asked Harriet, with deference. “Mind your own business,” he retorted. “And pull the muslin curtain aside so that I can see when any one comes in. I’ve told you before the shop’s nothing to do with you.” “There’s a lad rapping at the counter,” she remarked, disregarding his orders. Mr. Richards upset his chair in the anxiety to attend to his first customer, and hurried in, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “How do?” said the lad familiarly. “How you getting on at your new job? Settling down all right?” “What can I do for you, Jenkinson?” Richards rested the tips of his fingers on the counter and beamed across. “Tobacco or cigarettes?” “Last time me and you held conversation together,” remarked the lad—“I’m speaking now of a matter of six weeks ago, or it might be a couple of months—you distinctly told me, as far as I remember, that smoking at my time of life was playing the deuce with my health.” “Everything’s good if taken in moderation.” “And, furthermore, you said that if you caught me with a fag again, you’d report me to headquarters.” “My humour is what they call dry,” urged Richards. “You have to go below the surface to see what I’m really driving at. How are they managing at the old place? What’s the new inspector like? Some of you will find a difference, if I’m not greatly mistaken.” “We have!” “Ah!” “General opinion,” said the lad, with marked emphasis, “seems to be that this one is a gentleman.”