The respectable philanthropist, Charles Granter, is approached by a disreputable type on the Embankment in London, who attempts to blackmail him. Granter has just paid a visit to a pretty flower girl, a single mother in straightened circumstances, and the blackmailer wants ten pounds in return for not telling Granter's wife.
Granter is unsure how to deal with the situation. He refuses to give into the blackmailer's demands... but how will his wife respond to the situation? Should he involve the police? Is the flower girl implicated in the blackmail plot?
As Granter develops a plan of action, things take an unusual turn...
John Galsworthy was a brilliant British writer of short stories, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932.