Leeds and Sheffield. The fee would be fifteen guineas per lecture. Which for England, wasn’t at all bad. And there’d be very little work to do. It would just be a matter of re-hashing a few of his leaders in the World. Two hundred and forty guineas plus three thousand five hundred dollars. The best part of a thousand pounds. He would go and have a talk with his broker about the position and prospects of rubber. Or what about one of these Investment Trusts?

They gave you a very safe six or seven per cent. Burlap whistled softly as he walked. The tune was Mendelssohn’s ‘On Wings of Song.’ The Broad Christian and the Affiliated Ethicals had made him spiritually musical. He whistled with no less satisfaction when he thought of the day’s other triumph. He had definitely got rid of Ethel Cobbett. The moment had been auspicious. Miss Cobbett had gone away for her holiday. These things are easier to do by post than face to face. Mr. Chivers, the business manager, had written a business-like letter. For financial reasons a reduction of the staff of the Literary World was urgently necessary. He regretted, but… One month’s notice would have been legally sufficient. But as a token of the directors’ appreciation of her services he was enclosing a cheque for three months’ salary.

Any references she might require would always be forthcoming and he was hers faithfully. Burlap had tempered Mr. Chivers’s business-likeness with a letter of his own, full of regrets, and friendship, and jeremiads against a public that wouldn’t buy the Literary World, and lamentations over the defeat of God, incarnated in literature and himself, by Mammon in the person of Mr. Chivers and all business men. He had spoken of her to his friend Judd of the Wednesday Review, as well as to several other people in the journalistic world and would, of course, do everything in his power to etcetera.

Thank goodness, he reflected, as he walked along whistling ‘On Wings of Song’ with rich expression, that was the end of Ethel Cobbett so far as he was concerned. It was the end of her also as far as everybody was concerned. For some few days later, having written him a twelve-page letter, which he put in the fire after reading the first scarifying sentence, she lay down with her head in an oven and turned on the gas. But that was something which Burlap could not foresee. His mood as he walked whistling homewards was one of unmixed contentment. That night he and Beatrice pretended to be two little children and had their bath together. Two little children sitting at opposite ends of the big old-fashioned bath. And what a romp they had! The bathroom was drenched with their splashings. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.

The End