We missed her when she went abroad--which she always did the day a fresh
agreement was signed--and we welcomed her return to England and our
offices with effusion. Safely I can say no millionaire ever received
such an ovation as fell to the lot of Miss Blake when, after a foreign
tour, she returned to those lodgings near Brunswick Square, which her
residence ought, I think, to have rendered classic.

She never lost an hour in coming to us. With the dust of travel upon
her, with the heat and burden of quarrels with railway porters, and
encounters with cabmen, visible to anyone who chose to read the signs
of the times, Miss Blake came pounding up our stairs, wanting to see
Mr. Craven.

If that gentleman was engaged, she would sit down in the general office,
and relate her latest grievance to a posse of sympathising clerks.

"And he says he won't pay the rent," was always the refrain of these
lamentations.

"It is in Ireland he thinks he is, poor soul!" she was wont to declare.

"We'll teach him different, Miss Blake," the spokesman of the party
would declare; whilst another ostentatiously mended a pen, and a
third brought down a ream of foolscap and laid it with a thump before
him on the desk.

"And, indeed, you're all decent lads, though full of your tricks,"
Miss Blake would sometimes remark, in a tone of gentle reproof. "But
if you had a niece just dying with grief, and a house nobody will live