Front Matter · The treble clef

THE TREBLE CLEF

_BOOKS BY EDWARD C. BOOTH_

BELLA

THE POST GIRL “_The Post Girl_” is the American title of “The Cliff End”

THE DOCTOR’S LASS

FONDIE

THE TREE OF THE GARDEN

MISS PARKWORTH

THE TREBLE CLEF

_By_ EDWARD C. BOOTH

NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1924

PRINTED IN U.S.A.

VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC. BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK

To FREDERICK AND AGNES DAWSON IN FRIENDSHIP

Let us begin municipally.

On a night in late-Victorian November, whilst the years of our Lord still moved (some say more virtuously than these) among the prim and fast growing venerable eighteens, the Mayor of Daneborough was giving a party.

It was not a Banquet as had been anticipated, and for that reason some of the more substantial among the Burgesses and City Fathers disposed to murmur, saying the Dignity of the Office was being Brought Down. It was, in fact, a children’s Party, a juvenile fancy dress Ball, and by not a few nonconformist electors in the Mayor’s own ward this civic countenance of so reprehensible a practice for youth was deprecated, being translated as a direct reflection upon his predecessor in office, who held public happiness in as much abhorrence as a naked leg. Throughout the ex-Mayor’s term of office no wine had reddened a goblet nor foot slid over the waxed floor of the shrouded ballroom--which passed a whole year swathed in holland, save when it echoed the eloquence of frock-coated Missionaries and Temperance Orators, or simmered with the fervour of feminine meetings for the propagation of Christian Endeavour. But the present Mayor, who had a wife and family to consider, was a professed churchman of the Broad School, by which tolerantly comprehensive term he designated the whole aggregate of his personal opinions, and held himself superior to every form of bigotry not his own. The Party was ostensibly to celebrate the birthday of his eldest daughter, so that in late life she should look back with pride on having commemorated her fourteenth anniversary with civic honours, and it might also serve (the Mayoress hoped) to furnish her family with more social advantages than private life had hitherto provided for them.

Touching the night itself, nothing (surely) could have been more auspicious. There was an autumnal moisture in the air; a smell of fading leaf and smoke, mingled with a remote redolence of smouldering cartridge paper; a dim Guy Fawkes atmosphere derived from Chinese crackers and belated squibs that still sputtered abortively at street corners in survival of the fiery festival, or vomited their terrifying sparks through keyholes and letter-boxes of the unprotected, where emulators of the great Guido had thrust them. There was a thin yellow mist--the very emblem of municipality--that wrapped up each street lamp in a halo, like a sick face in a blanket, and gave it a swollen and lugubrious, yet a civic and seasonable look. Some of this mist, deposited solidly on the street flags, damped and darkened them, so that they gleamed dully beneath the rays of the gas lamps and the treacly light that stuck to shop windows and open doors.

Round one of these doors in one of Daneborough’s smaller residential streets a group of children was gathered. It had begun with the most exemplary intent to form and to maintain a double line between the doorway and an attendant cab, drawn up by the kerb, but under the influence of a tense excitement and the agitated compression of numbers it shifted its shape violently and incessantly, varying from that of a twisted horse-shoe to no shape at all. By the fascination with which its agitated components glued their eyes upon the door and strove among themselves for priority of place, it was plain that events of no ordinary importance were in progress. From time to time the door,--which, not less agitated by unseen influences than the crowd dependent on it, was never altogether closed,--opened mysteriously, and a child’s head, emerging at a height somewhat lower than that of the knob, called out anxiously to the cab-driver: “She won’t be long.” Adding as though in communication with another and more authoritative voice, inaudible to the expectant crowd, whose utterance it received and transmitted: “You’re to stay there. You’re not to go. She’s got her frock on!” To which the cabman, betraying signs of a natural moroseness or of impatience due to delay, and expectorating belligerently on the kerb, retorted in a voice a shade or two foggier than the night, and less genial: “Tell ’em to hurry up, d’y’ear? Tell ’em to look sharp. This isn’t the only job, tell ’em. I’ve got three more orders for 7-20 besides theirs. How much longer are they going to be?”

Receiving no answer from the door, which was again pushed mysteriously to, he turned upon the horse, whose profile he scanned with an eye of growing displeasure, venting his wrath at last in an explosive: “Hod up!”

The horse, a flinching sad-mouthed animal of a useful nondescript colour that could, and did, (as emergency demanded) serve with equal propriety in a bridal coach or funeral hearse, thus vehemently awakened out of dreams, threw up its head at the objurgation and shook all its harness so violently as to startle cries of alarm from the group and precipitate several of the more importunate members over the doorstep. The cabman appeared to take this natural action of his horse as a personal affront. Looking the animal up and down from end to end with an eye of withering scorn, he seized it by the rein which he tugged two or three times with vigour as if pulling a refractory doorbell, crying “Woa! What! Would you!” Still holding it masterfully by the rein with his right hand he threatened its evasive muzzle with a menaceful left fist that caused the animal to brandish its head wildly aloft like a butcher’s cleaver, and to chew the lamp-lit fog with its yellow teeth to the great dismay of the crowd.

This altercation between the driver and his steed, which had seemed likely to be protracted, was brought to a sudden end by the reappearance of the forehead under the doorknob, that cried excitedly: “Hey! They’re coming now. She’s ready. They’re wrapping her up. You’re to stay there”--and ran back to take part in what seemed to be a ceremony of importance. From a staircase at the immediate end of the narrow passage now revealed to view there descended with some precipitation a considerable party of people; adults and children confusedly mixed; all animated by a very visible excitement. The children ran backward, clapping their hands; the adults were flushed and voluble. One of them, a man with a brown beard, carried in his arms a little girl enveloped in innumerable shawls, whose face against his shoulder shone singularly white, with a waxen polish on her brow, as though but lately resurrected from a sickbed. It was remarked by the spectators--stirred now to such a pitch of intensity that the foreheads of the outer flanks collided--that the two legs depending limply from the bearer’s arms were clad in stockings of the palest blue, and that there was lace on her frock. Behind her came a little boy muffled up to the ears in an overcoat and led by the hand. On his head was a black and yellow cricket cap, and white stockings were visible beneath the great coat. An adult followed with a highly stained cricket bat, begging the community on no account to forget it. The little boy’s patent slippers squeaked loudly as he walked, and though he gazed fixedly at the crowd that awaited him by the door, it seemed to be some other self rather than his own that occupied, perplexed, this unaccustomed raiment.

The little girl, having been deposited in the profundities of the cab (where she made miraculous recovery of her limbs and animation in a moment), the little boy, lifted across the humid pavement, was bestowed beside her. There ensued an excited recapitulation of instructions, rendered by so many voices as to resemble not unremotely some chorus from an oratorio. “Be sure and look after her, Freddie.” “Alice, be sure and look after Freddie.” “Has he blown his nose?” “Don’t push bat through cab-window, now! Hold it down.” “Have they got their hankerchers?” A sudden voice of consternation demanded “Which on ’em’s got the invitation card?”--a timely suggestion that served to throw the cab into convulsions, all the adults thrusting themselves through the doorway together so that, had the sad-mouthed horse but chosen this moment to move on, there must have been a heavy demand on the casual ward at the Infirmary. The cards, ultimately discovered in the right-hand pocket of the little boy’s overcoat, where some adult and prudent hand had previously placed them, were for safety’s sake transferred to the left, though even this procedure was not without its disputants, one asking: “Wouldn’t he be better with them in his hand?” and another: “Aye, but what about bat?” and a third: “Why! Let him carry bat, and gie cards to Lucy,” and a fourth, smitten with misgivings: “Bat! Why, what’s gotten it? Where’s bat now? Who’s seen bat? Has Freddie got bat? As like as not he hasn’t. Show us bat, Freddie!” And the bat being groped for at the bottom of the cab, where it had been suffered to lapse during the quest for the cards, and publicly displayed to the great peril of the cab-window: “Remember” (its owner was admonished) “there’s two cards. Yours and Lucy’s. You’re not to give ’em up to nobody while you get to Mansion House, think on, or they won’t let you in....” At which the cabman, long smouldering under all this retardation of affairs, succeeded in his manœuvre to seize hold of the door handle at last, and had every appearance of being about to slam the door with prodigious violence when his intention was frustrated by a startling scream:

“His fingers! His fingers!”

The infection of alarm thrilled through the house party like a shudder, and even the children and the cabdriver were visibly awed. It seemed as if disaster had in truth befallen.

“I never seed his fingers,” the cabdriver murmured in sullen self-defence. “Where’d he put ’em?”

“It’s not where he’d put ’em,” the originator of the scream replied, “but where he _might_ ’a put ’em. My word, it’s gave me quite a turn.” A chorus of outraged voices assented, “Why, no wonder. An’ me an’ all.” “Child might have had his hand trapped off!” “Folks can never be too careful how they shut doors when there’s children about.” “Are you all right, Freddie?” “Hold up your hand. Which hand was it?” “His right. My word. Might ’a lamed him.” “Doors should never be slammed, missus. Not even if folks is in a temper. One never knows what might come of it.” “It’s a good thing you thought to stop him in time.”

The cabdriver, humiliated and murmurous after this fruitless expenditure of anxiety and precious time, stood holding the offending door ajar. “Is his fingers all right now? Can I shut ’em up _this_ time? I shall never get them other orders done to-night.” A frantic clamour of warnings, reinforced with every gesture of command and supplication, appealing hands and shaking fists, burst forth from the adult party. “Freddy!” “Lucy!” “Stand back, do you hear! He’s going to shut door.” Which the irate driver did with the suppressed violence of a blasphemy, and clambering upon the box drew the chaff-strewn horsecloth around his nether limbs with as much injured dignity as if it had been some minor and dishonoured prophet’s mantle.

“The Mansion House,” he was directed from below. “The Mansion House. Tell him the Mansion House. To the Mansion House.” The cab, rumbling like distant thunder and grating sparks from the kerb with its iron tyres, lunged into the mist. Moroseness, wrapped in a horse blanket, sat statuesquely on the box; the spirit of protest thumped between the ribs of the bony horse and poured in trumpets through its quivering nostrils; dulled expectation and dazed excitement palpitated in the atmosphere of mildewed cushions within the cab; pride and envy followed the cab’s progress from behind, where the adults viewed its transit with loquacious satisfaction and a disorderly retinue of childhood pursued the rumbling vehicle, drawn on by heaven knows what elemental instinct to attach themselves vicariously to greatness by any nexus however vague and slender, and be some part--no matter how fractional or remote--of the cherished glories of this night.

Of the children comprised in this animated group the greater number belonged to that class which imparts the predominating aroma to school feasts and Sunday schools. Their clothing, if not actually ragged, was overworn and threadbare, and in its totality impregnated the mist with a foist odour of garments too habitually worn. Their faces, despite the eager freshness of youth, betrayed even to the dingy cab-lamps the sickliness of skins too rarely cleansed; their hands displayed a dull and questionable flesh, and finger-nails edged with deepest mourning. They pertained in fact, to that order of youthful society in which Friday bathnights and Saturday pennies were fitful and legendary things; which must depend on its own exertions for all its joys in life, being reduced to run here and there after funerals, dog-fights, street accidents and drunken men, and chase persistently behind elusive pleasure.

But one there was among their number--a little boy--to whom these attributes do not apply. At one time he had been among the foremost in the gathering, of the very germ and nucleus of its growth; a polite and unassertive onlooker devoid of speech or motion. But with each successive pair of hands he forfeited some part of his original advantage, until at last he occupied a modest station on the very outskirts of excitement, almost beyond reach of the candle-light from the cab’s near lamp, that--when some flickering elongation of its beam kindled his face--revealed him no true component of the throng he mildly haunted, but a constituent foreign and detached.

Although the round cloth cap he wore, and the woollen muffler about his neck, and the knitted gloves and belted coat and knickerbockers--all of them black--were weekaday and new no longer, there was a care revealed in their selection, and a polite and conscious care in his wearing of them that hinted at home and a mother’s something more than love. Surely that knitted muffler round his neck, its ends so scrupulously tucked away into the breast of his little coat, had been tied by a mother’s hands; none other would have fashioned it so deftly to the work it should perform. His face, when now and then he turned it this way or that--and the interest displayed on it was never of the unabashed and public sort that marked the noisy naked curiosities of his neighbours--his face was scarcely less clean than the super-clean face of the little girl in the pale blue stockings who emerged tired and triumphant from the doorway in the arms of the bearded man. It was a delicate and fragile face; the brows finely pencilled; the eyes, enlarged and softened by their veil of lashes, brown and wistful, whilst a small and sensitive mouth whose lips looked as if they might have quivered at a word confirmed the impression of a childhood still protected from the roughness of the world, and rendered more susceptible to it by a mother’s sheltering love.

For a brief while after the cab had rolled away, he rested pensive and solitary on the kerb, and truth compels the admission that in his troubled heart there even welled a yearning (shameful and unworthy of a gentleman, he knew) to pursue this phantom and portentous vehicle so wondrously compounded of mist and lamplight and its own rumble to the very gateway of the Mayor’s great house in the High Gate, and there be witness of the converging of all these individual glories, and let his lips vicariously touch the rim of that cup of brimming happiness which the mayoral hospitality extended not to him. Instead, he detached himself from his meditations with a guilty start, drew up resolutely in turn each wristlet of his knitted gloves with conscious care, and set off briskly up the street in a course directly opposite to that the cab had taken.

His step confirmed the impression produced by his features and apparel. Other boys--of the sort that had pursued the cab--might have broken into a noisy and irregular run, kicking loosely at the doorsteps as they passed by, or leaping up to bring their mouths for shouting purposes on a level with each letterbox, or jumping the scrapers, or whistling, or brandishing their arms. But the little boy in the black woollen gloves and knitted comforter displayed none of these attainments. Instead, he kept his lips gently but firmly closed, drawing the mist and expelling it through two small precise and sober nostrils. He walked very silently and shadow-like, preserving the conscientious centre of the path; his head politely yet not too proudly erect; his gloved hands closed and held in due subjection to his sides, without looking too much to right or left (save at a corner or street crossing, where in obedience to maternal law he halted and made punctilious reconnaissance on all sides of him before committing his person to the perils of the road). For was he not Oswald Holmroyd, the son of the best of fathers, and had not his mother’s love exhorted him never to lose sight of this fact, nor ever, under any circumstances, to forget he was a gentleman? And if his occupation this evening perhaps could scarcely claim to rank among the gentlemanly callings commonly accredited, might not this be all the better reason for striving to remember who and what he was?

As he pursued his walk, immersed in the filial task of Remembering, he was (nevertheless) curiously susceptible to cabs. Cabs, in fact, appeared to be on every hand, and the rumble of them persisted obstinately in his ears. Now, at a street corner, he would have to draw back from the kerb whilst some empty and oscillating vehicle, drawn by a galloping steed--smoking like a clothes-horse and steaming away into the mist as if it were the very source of it--rocked tempestuously over the crossing, hot from one journey and belated for the next. Or it was a vehicle of more substantial burden, its steamy windows showing blurred and blot-like visages behind the glass and internal hands rubbing peeping places on the vapoured pane, that rolled with a comfortable motion to the Mansion House, where the striped awning flagged humidly under the weight of fog, and the two policemen stood by the two portly and aldermanic lampposts, and a crimson carpet flowed all the way from the Mayoral staircase to the pavement’s edge.

Oswald’s errand took him through the upper end of the High Gate--where the High Gate becomes residential and calls itself Hill Street--to a big semi-detached house in St. Lawrence Square. Only a single and ineffectual gaslamp guarded each entrance to the Square, and as the houses were ranged on the three sides of a green enclosure, the mist--encouraged by the trees and herbage--lay somewhat more thickly here, folding these residences away from common observation, and enlarging their foggy shapes when seen to preternatural magnitude. No sounds of noisy childhood disturbed the formal silence of this sequestered space, nor Chinese crackers sputtered in the gloom. The light that percolated here and there through blinds or through the fans over the front doors, or from some upper window where more than one gaslit globe could be descried gleaming like a sickly moon, spread no part of its comfort or hospitality abroad. And perhaps to the little Oswald, trying never to forget he was a gentleman, this effect of illuminative reserve--as though the globes and very gas-jets shone for nobody but their owners, and grudged each ray expended in surplus of necessity--might be exaggerated. Even gas-jets and front doors and railings and bell pulls can present an attitude of studious discouragement.

Yet there is, or surely must be, something in the quality of true gentlemanliness that neither night nor mist nor silence can conceal. For, noiseless though he tried to be (and was) no sooner had the little Oswald reached the dim profundity of the porch he sought, than there arose a sudden stir within: a violent and vehement commotion, it seemed to him, occasioned by his advent, that robbed his paralyzed right arm of any power to reach or ring the bell. Disconcerting voices broke out at close quarters behind the solid panels of the big front door, and almost simultaneously it burst open before his blinking eyes with the exclamation:

“It’s Him at last!”

Yes, It was Him at last. Him in very truth. Through the embarrassment caused by this so cordial and unexpected reception pride stirred not unpleasantly within the small boy’s bosom. Gentlemanliness, like Virtue, was its own reward, then, after all. His mother had been right; her counsels were justified. Always, and under every circumstance, Be a Gentleman.

The flood of light let out upon his shrinking eyes dazzled him with the bright vision of an apocalyptic hall. The very light itself seemed luminously rich as though (albeit fed from the same main) of a quality superior to that which starved in the municipal gaslamps without. The great globe suspended over the chequered tiles seemed--to this recent denizen of the dark--bursting with its own effulgence; beneath its mellow beams he had the consciousness of rugs and staircases and polished banisters and clocks and curtains and impressive human figures in the overwhelming plural. The hand that had flung open the door so startlingly was red and fleshy, emerging from a white starched cuff which, in conjunction with a cap and apron, proclaimed itself the property of a maid. Simultaneously with the cry “It’s Him!” she stabbed her glance into the misty void above Oswald’s head as though accrediting him with a stature greater than he owned, and continued without a pause. “Do you call this 7-25? What’s use of ordering?”

What’s use of ordering!

At a rebuff so unexpected the little Oswald’s spirit, so briefly stimulated, as briefly sank. Did he call this 7-25? He had no notion what it was or what they called it. What was the use of ordering? Why! What indeed! His mouth quivered; his brow fell; a flush--like some fabled monster with burning jaws began to swallow him wholemeal, from the feet upwards. It was Ended. Gentlemanliness was altogether routed and put to shame. There would be no orders--for, as the maid had properly declared: “What was the use of ordering?”

He proffered no excuse, but mutely stood, confessing fault and penitence with downcast eyes. And the maid’s eyes--tempered in the crucible of years of experience for answering doors and putting errand boys and beggars in their place--after a moment’s conflict with the outer darkness, dropped upon the mortified cap and muffler and black woollen gloves, and cried in tones of almost incredulous disgust:

“Well I declare! It isn’t Him mum.”

A lady’s voice repeated irritably: “Not HIM?” “Not Him!” echoed in shrill dismay from the lips of a little girl, poised in tense expectancy on the lowermost stair with her hand on the volute of the banister. “Surely! Whoever is it, then?” asked the lady petulantly.

“Why ... it’s the Sausage Boy!” declared the little girl, running from the curtail step to the centre of the hall in order to take stock of the visitor who was not Him, and the Sausage Boy thus by name proclaimed deemed the moment opportune to be a Gentleman in earnest, according to strict prescription, which consisted in raising the round black cap with the black glove and lowering his eyes and breathing in a voice so politely attenuated as to be not very much more audible than Thought:

“Please ... Mother sends her compliments and wishes to know....”

What his mother, by these complimentary methods, wished to know did not immediately transpire, for there were things the lady in the hall sought to know too; other, more pressing, urgent things that absorbed the whole of her attention.

“Isn’t he there at all, then?” she asked. The maid--first brushing the silenced gentleman to one side as she stepped into the porch to thrust a scrutinizing head beyond its pillars,--exclaimed: “Nay, that he isn’t mum. He isn’t anywheres.”

The lady, whose left arm (as little Oswald, through his downcast eyelids dimly noticed) was hid beneath a cloud of fleecy wraps and shawls, made peremptory sounds of displeasure with her tongue and teeth, and promptly subjected the maid to a searching catechism. Was the maid quite sure she had given the right time--though to be sure their own common sense might have told them! Had she particularly mentioned that it was for Mrs. Bankett, No. 3 St. Lawrence Square--though to be sure the name itself should be quite enough. “Everybody knows Mrs. Bankett, St. Lawrence Square.” To which the maid, resenting this public reflection on her powers of ordering, retaliated with a degree of certitude only short of defiance. All these things had she done, and given the message twice over--to Him and to Her as well--and had stood by and seen it wrote upon the slate. “I told ’em particular it was for the Mansion House. And both Him and Her promised faithful it shouldn’t be forgot. But them cabs is all alike, mum. There’s no depending on ’em. They’ll promise anything, cabs will. They want smartening up. That’s what cabs want.”

The little girl whose mind had been visibly distracted between anxiety about the cab and concern to have her importance properly acknowledged by this adventitious pair of eyes, advanced to the porch under profession of looking for the defaulting vehicle, and addressed Oswald.

“I’m going to the Mayor’s Party. This is my dress. I am Little Bo Peep. Here is the crook I have to carry.” She held forth a shepherdess’s staff the height of herself, wound from the top to bottom with a white ribbon and decorated below the crook with a broad pink bow twice the size of that she wore in her crimped and golden hair. All around her pink skirt (as she was particular to point out to the little boy framed dimly in the porch like some old master against a background of mist and darkness) frolicsome fleecy lambs sported in white wool, their eyes glittering with glass beads, their tails constituting a tasseled fringe. Moreover, to guard against any possible misconception on the part of an unintelligent public, the hem of her frock was boldly encircled with the legend (in gilt lettering): LITTLE BO PEEP HAS LOST HER SHEEP. Her shoes and stockings were of the palest (and it seemed to Oswald) costliest silk, of a shade for which his limited nomenclature had no name. White lace mittens extended from her knuckles to her elbows, and these she displayed in turn. “Look, I am to wear these. We only exchanged them this morning. The others were too large. Aren’t you going to the Party? Of course you aren’t. Weren’t you asked? Listen! Is that the cab? O, I wish the cab would come. I shall be late.”

All this intelligence and interrogation she poured out with such volubility that the most of it was uttered before the lady with the shawls had time to interrupt the colloquy, saying:

“Eleanor! Come away from the door. The mist is dreadfully thick. You might easily catch cold in those thin clothes.”

And though Oswald, trying hard to be a gentleman, was troubled to decide in what appropriate words or manner he should acknowledge so great a condescension, his own pride, alternately encouraged and depressed, began to stir him pleasurably again. For he was yet too young and inexperienced to know that Vanity does not scruple to make use of the meanest mirror to reflect her glory, and that even the greatest of this world will stoop to warm the fingers of their pride at any comfortable flame, without too much inquiry as to the nature of the fuel that feeds it. And since, moreover, a flattered vanity is the father of affection, the little Oswald was filled on a sudden with a deep and fervent and perfectly embarrassing devotion to this fairy figure in her silks and furbelows. There was no doubt (his gratitude affirmed) that she was beautiful. There was no doubt that she was richly dressed. Much more beautiful, and much more richly dressed than the inanimate young lady with the pendent legs and sick and waxen cheek pressed against the man’s brown beard, who had been borne out of the gloomy gaslit passage and deposited in the recesses of the gloomier cab. And even she had stirred the sensitive fancy of the little Sausage Boy and kindled within his bosom that inflammable material of imagination ever ready to catch the quickening spark and burn to the most heroic and noble resolves. But O! Not like this one. Not worthy, indeed, to be compared with the richly decorated daughter of Mrs. Bankett of St. Lawrence Square, whom everybody knew.

Out of his ineffable inner glories he was awakened with a start by the sound of Mrs. Bankett’s voice. Deceived by the dimness and silence of the porch into fancying it empty, she asked if the little boy were still there.

Yes, the little boy was still there, and deeming the moment this time positively at hand for him to be a Gentleman in earnest, raised his cap anew and recited in a voice as carefully modulated as before the pious formula committed to his memory: “Please ... Mother sends her compliments and wishes to know....”

He stopped again, for again--by the moving of her lips--it seemed there were things Mrs. Bankett also wished to know. She wished to know, for instance, (not addressing the mist-invaded porch, but the maid) if (perhaps) the Sausage Boy would run as far as Jobling’s and tell the cab to come at once. The maid, without troubling to refer to the porch, told her mistress she was sure he would (mum) and turning to Oswald translated Mrs. Bankett’s query into the present imperative.

“Missus says you’re to run to Jobling’s and tell cab to come at once.”

“Does he know where Jobling’s is?” Mrs. Bankett interposed.

“You know where Jobling’s is, don’t you?” said the maid. “Where the cabs come from?”

“Tell him the Livery Stables,” prompted Mrs. Bankett.

“Livery Stables ...” said the maid.

“In Queen Street,” Mrs. Bankett added. “Just beyond the pump, tell him, Mary.”

“You’ve got to look sharp!” the maid admonished him. “Don’t stop anywheres on the way. Go as quick as you can, and tell cab to come at once. Mrs. Bankett’s, think on....” She impressed the directions on his mind.

“The name will be sufficient, Mary,” Mrs. Bankett threw in from the hall. “Everybody knows my name. But perhaps ...” she added prudently, “he had better say St. Lawrence Square.”

“You’re to say St. Lawrence Square,” the maid repeated.

“And the number ...” Mrs. Bankett said. “Not,” her dignity explained, “that there’s any need. But still.... On a night like this. They’re so stupid. I must call round to-morrow. No. 3, tell him.”

“You’re to tell ’em No. 3,” the maid interpreted as Oswald turned to go. “Cab’s been ordered since before half past ten this morning, tell ’em. We’re stood waiting of ’em, tell ’em. Say they ought to be ashamed of theirselves. What’s the good of ordering, tell ’em. Say we shall order off of somebody else next time, unless they mend. Stop! Hark! Is yon cab coming?... No! I might ’a known it wasn’t. Everybody’s cab’ll be coming but ours. Well? What are you standing and staring there for? Do you mean to stop all night? Be off wi’ you.”

Oswald raised his cap politely--albeit to nobody in particular, since nobody was looking at him--readjusted his gloves and commenced the descent of the four steps, that went black as ink the moment he trod on the first of them, being cut off from the source of light by the closing of the door. He had to grope his way to the gate, for the brilliance of the big yellow globe so long looked at remained imprinted on the fundus of his eye, and interposed complementary blots between that and all he sought to see. But once in the square he took to his heels, inspired by the pressing importance of the service he had been called upon to render, and also by the noblest desire to repay the little girl in the pink party frock for the honour she had conferred on him. He would shew her how a gentleman could run. She should see with what speed a gentleman could deliver messages. He knew Queen Street and the erect wooden pump with the stiff one arm like a Chelsea pensioner--that in another month’s time would be swathed in straw for Christmas, with a swollen look as if it had the mumps--and he knew Jobling’s Livery Stables, and the cab was ordered before half past ten, and what was the use of ordering, and they were waiting of them now, and they ought to be ashamed of themselves. All the way he kept rehearsing his instructions, saying them over and over to himself with fervour, fearful lest any portion of the committed message might escape his memory as he ran. In his kindled zeal he longed beyond anything to deliver his instructions intact, down to the smallest particle. As he turned out of the square, such was his burning confidence reciprocating the confidence reposed in him, he believed he could do it. But with each successive step that took him nearer Jobling’s the plastic facility of the phrases seemed to set and stiffen. And as he came in sight and scent of Jobling’s yard--which was just off Hill Street, and not more than an easy three minutes’ run from St. Lawrence Square--the message in his mouth was mixed up with horrible misgivings, and memory itself began to falter.

Outside, against the kerb, stood the pump: the wooden pump with whose rigid and rheumatic handle Queen Street infancy (under no obligation whatever to be a gentleman) was wont to play ride-a-cock-horse, shrouded now by the mist that clung broodingly about its person and enlarged its bulk to preternatural proportions. And beyond the pump yawned the arched and vaulted carriage way to Jobling’s yard exhaling pungent equine odours; a dark and disconcerting void that engulfed the little Oswald’s figure and lent an echoing sepulchral character to his faltering footsteps over the unlevel cobbles with which the yard was paved--causing him to turn an anxious head for reassurance that the pump had not crept up behind him. Probing his way forward with both hands protectfully outspread, he came at the farther end of the vaulted carriage-way upon a stable lamp suspended on a nail. The lamp’s glass was so opaquely smoked as to yield no perceptible light whatever; the brown flame, half smothered in a sooty deposit, emitted a moribund and lugubrious gleam. Had it been Him himself, hanging in expiring throes from a wall-hook, the effect could scarcely have been more disturbing to a Gentleman. But he mustered courage to apply his knuckles to the door which the expiring lantern was obviously intended to illuminate, and took the liberty to cough--hoping that the cough rather than the knuckles would betray his modest presence to whatever other presence had its awful habitation in the darks and silences of this place. Three times he knocked upon the door, coughing apologetically on each occasion to let those know who listened with what humility he ventured to disturb their peace, and held his knuckles already raised to give a fourth and final summons--a loud, conclusive summons this, that should be audible even to himself--when with startling suddenness an unsuspected door at right angles to the one he knocked at flew open without a sound, letting out an elongated track of light across the glistening cobbles with a magnified great shadow projected from the middle of it.

“Who’s there?” demanded a voice after an interval of intense silence, in which neither Oswald nor the shadow moved. The voice was a woman’s voice, sharp and terse, that ripped the silence as if it had been calico.

“It’s me,” said Oswald.

“Who’s me?”

“Oswald Holmroyd.”

“Come your ways here,” pronounced the voice, which evidently belonged to the ‘Her’ that the maid had spoken of, and when Oswald approached the silhouette confronting him: “Now then,” it asked. “What do you want?”

“Please ...” he began, and relapsed into the pious formula, “ ... mother sends her compliments and wishes to know....” With which, realizing the enormity of his offence, his powers of articulation failed him.... “It’s the cab,” he found strength to whisper after a pause.

“Cab? Cabs is all out,” the silhouette informed him, which was the silhouette of a middle-aged woman in a coarse apron, with her sleeves rolled up to the elbows. “What time do you want cab for?”

“To-night,” Oswald urged, with the breathlessness of desperation. “At once, please.”

“Is it for the station?”

“It’s for the Mansion House.” The message, almost irrecoverably lost in the stirring episodes of these recent moments, surged back on him with all its pristine force. “They’re waiting now.”

“Who’s waiting?”

“Mrs. Bankett.”

“Which Mrs. Bankett?”

For the life of Oswald could he think which Mrs. Bankett, although he had Mrs. Bankett’s own authority for saying “the Mrs. Bankett that everybody knows.” Instead he relapsed impotently upon the address: No. 3, St. Lawrence Square.

“It is on the Slate,” he prompted, with lips of such awed politeness that they scarcely moved, and eyes of such delicate consideration for her feelings that they dared not look. She repeated “Slate?” and reaching out an arm beyond the door drew forth the very slate in fact, from a nail in the wall, that she held diagonally towards the invisible source of light with one hand and traced a way through a labyrinth of figures with the forefinger of the other. “Aye!” she said at length. “It’s here, safe enough. He’s got it. He’s taken it down. It’ll be all right. Maybe he’s there by now. If not I’ll send him straight as soon as he comes back. Cabs is busy to-night.”

There was a pause. The interview seemed ended. The door was closing. It closed. Simultaneously the little Oswald was in gloom again.

His return to the Square coincided with the apparition of a cab--an empty, rattling and resounding cab that came up the Hill Street at a gallop, rocked uproariously over the crossing, and bounced up to the house of Mrs. Bankett whom everybody knew. It was Him. Him at last. Oswald’s heart, depressed till now, leaped exultantly within him. Here were the fruits of his errand. The cab grated up to the kerb; the big door opened; coagulated light flowed sluggishly from the porch; the voice of the maid exclaimed, “You’re a nice one, _you_ are!” An injured voice retorted, “I’ve come as fast as I could. I couldn’t drive no faster.” There was a stir and bustle in the porch; a gleam of shawls and silks; a mixture of eager voices; the slamming of a cab door; the slashing of a whip, and the cab rolled past the silent Oswald and out of the square. The maid watched it from the gate till its mist-enveloped shape had turned the corner, exchanging words with some invisible figure in the porch that Oswald judged to be the Mrs. Bankett that everybody knew. Then the clash of the gate was succeeded by tripping footsteps and a ruffle of skirts in motion.

A fear stabbed swiftly through the heart of the little Oswald. He turned a supplicating face to the porch, but the action came too late. He was left standing by the railings. His gentlemanliness had hesitated all too long to act or to proclaim itself. Fearful of intruding he had taken up his modest station at some few paces from the gate, awaiting only the departure of the cab to tender once again his twice frustrated message: “Please ... Mother sends her compliments ... and wishes to know....”

It had seemed to him that his presence was amicably recognized and admitted. The maid had looked in his direction twice as if she smiled. The little girl appeared to include him in the farewell waving of her mittened fingers through the window. And now they were all gone, the gate and front door closed inexorably against him. A lump compounded of impotence and self-compassion rose up into his throat. Could he dare to ring the bell a second time? No, he could not. It was impossible. He was too much of a gentleman. He had had too good a father. He had been too well brought up.

All he could do was to stand with his cheeks pressed despairingly against the gate, gazing at the porch and hoping.... Hoping that even now they might remember him; that even now the door might suddenly fly open, that voices might float out into the mist in search of him: “Little boy!... Little boy!”

But no such summons stirred the watcher’s heart. Much later in the evening--long after the dampness had accumulated once more on those portions of the gate dried now by little Oswald’s troubled cheek and gloves, the maid cried in the kitchen: “Lawks! Yon lad’s forgotten all about sausages. A nice thing trusting such as him with a message. As like as not he never went for cab at all.”

Is there anywhere defeat more dreadful than that sustained within the region of one’s heart alone?

The little Oswald, relinquishing his hold upon the gate at last, withdrew from the scene of this inglorious battle, humiliated and despondent. How could he justify such treacherous capitulation to his own cowardice? Whence came this terrible discrepancy between the heroic greatness of his thought and the pusillanimity of action? For it was useless that courage, from some craven hiding-place in his despair, called upon him in a trembling voice to be a twelfth-hour gentleman or die, saying: “What if the maid servant is angry? Anger hurts nobody. What if she cries ‘It’s Him!’ _Be_ Him so long as Him is a gentleman and raises his hat. Nothing a servant says or does can change a gentleman.”

And though courage, gathering voice and importunity, in inverse ratio to its distance from the porch, expostulated with him thus, always his apostate footsteps led him (more laggingly as he neared it) in the direction of his home.

It was a house in a long street, and in a dark street too, when at last he reached it--though the darkness here lent no such dignity to bricks and mortar as it did in St. Lawrence Square, or such gloomy horrors as it did to Jobling’s Yard. The houses stood in unbroken rank, shoulder to shoulder; every door succeeded by a window, and every window by a door in turn; each doorstep abutting on the pavement in company with a cast-iron scraper and cellar grate. Only at rare intervals did these houses present a glimmering of intelligent light towards the street. Now and again some door slammed in the darkness here or there, going off like a gun and rattling its own knocker with the force of its concussion, and invisible footsteps hurried this way or that--some of which, after the briefest journey, terminated curiously without a sound, whilst others were extinguished by a distant door-slam, similar (but fainter) to that which had brought them into being. The door knob that Oswald took at last in both his hands to turn protruded from a door distinguished superficially by little from its neighbours. But the instant his fingers closed upon it--and this evening they did so more tardily and silently than usual--a sudden welcoming voice called out his name: a voice inflected to interrogation, and yet with a certitude that rose above all query.

“Oswald?”

With the door-knob in both hands still pressed against his bosom he pushed his way into the narrow passage beyond.

“Yes, mother.”

“Is that you?”

“Yes, mother.”

“Come my child! I was growing anxious about you. There are so many cabs to-night. Did you take the greatest care?”

“Yes, mother.”

The voice that thus addressed the little Oswald was sweet and musical, but more striking than either of these two excellent qualities was its colour of unmistakable tenderness. Mother-solicitude so sweetened and suffused it that the dark, irradiated by this clear beacon of a voice, shed all its lurking terrors in a moment and became serene and harmless. Simultaneously with Oswald’s entrance a chink of light, drawn perpendicularly like a chalk line from top to bottom of the right-hand passage wall, expanded to a vivid oblong, and the owner of the voice came into view at the foot of a flight of stairs. One side of her caught the bright illumination, the other lay in shadow. Still, her figure presented an effect of radiance, being covered with a white overall, whose sleeves--like the sleeves of Her who had appeared so startlingly to Oswald at Jobling’s--were rolled up above the elbows, and both her hands and three parts of each forearm were floury white. But these were very different arms, and this was a very different voice, and the look that accosted Oswald was a very different look. It fell upon him anxiously at first, seizing on every part of him to make sure he was, in truth, her very son, unaltered and unhurt, and melting over him thereafter in a visual embrace of fondest reassurance. She could not embrace him with her arms, for all she showed desire to do so, but she held these out for his admission and he walked passively within their bay to receive upon his uplifted face the fervent mother-kiss betraying the gratification of a hunger long denied. The expression of her countenance when it stooped to him, and of her voice when--the kiss bestowed--it said “My boy!” were curiously blended of love, compassion and exultant pride, as if with him pressed defensively to her bosom she flung a challenge to the world whose dangers he had so lately braved. Before such manifestation of unbounded love the recipient’s eyes sank guiltily beneath the weight of their unworthiness; his lips quivered and forgot their function for very shame, until those other lips reminded them: “ ... Aren’t you going to kiss your mother, Oswald?” Yes ... he was going to kiss her. He kissed her, in fact, laying his chilly mouth against her cheek. She noted the inertness of the lips, and withdrew from the caress, crying he must be cold and tired after his long round, and how thoughtless of her to keep him standing in the passage when there was such a warm and lovely fire awaiting him inside. With which, solicitously guiding him with her arms, she pressed her son towards the open door from which she had emerged, that led--as it appeared--into the kitchen. In the brightly polished range a red and glowing fire lent its aid to the single naked gas-jet, that might have shed a cheerless ineffectual light but for the blazing co-operation of the coals. On the scoured deal table beneath the gas pendant stood a glazed pancheon containing paste, which, together with a paste-board, a large tin flour-dredger, a rolling pin, a bowl of water, half a dozen round baking tins or more, of different sizes, carefully lined with greased paper, and other culinary implements, sufficiently explained the state of Mrs. Holmroyd’s wrists and the work on which she was engaged.

Under other circumstances and in other hands this kitchen might, perhaps, have worn a bare and hardened look, for there was but little furniture in it, and that of the simplest kind. Its walls were colour-washed a cleanly buff; a buff blind hung before its solitary window; some cheap wooden chairs and a square of crimson-edged fibre matting beneath the central table, reinforced with two or three grocers’ coloured almanacs and a row of polished spice canisters on the mantelpiece practically completed its equipment. The part-opened door of a painted cupboard afforded a glimpse of crockery and familiar blue sugar bags. Another door beyond this led down into a tiny scullery.

But the cheerful conjunction of lights and the spotless cleanliness of every object revealed by them, and beyond all the presence of Oswald’s mother, transmuted these bare walls and meagre furniture into an expression of a something greater than themselves. This kitchen, one might affirm, possessed a soul; a countenance of almost human kindliness, that loveless labours had not soiled or soured; a voice capable of uttering--to the little Oswald at least--the dear word “Home.” As he unwrapped the woollen muffler from his neck, his glance instinctively went the round of all the empty chairs as though in quest of some expected presence. The action, slight though it was, did not escape his mother’s eye. She answered the silent question that it asked:

“Beryl has gone to bed,” she told him. “I think she must be asleep.”

As though in contradiction to the statement a far-away and childish voice cried “Mother” with long-drawn breath, “Has Oswald come back?” Oswald answered for himself: “I’m here, Beryl!” The far-away voice returned: “Come here, Oswald. I want to say good-night.” In Mrs. Holmroyd’s eyes a look of sadness crept. “Poor Beryl! I had been hoping she was asleep. Don’t ... don’t say anything to disturb her, Oswald. She cried after you were gone to-night. Try and help her to forget it.”

The call, mournfully protracted, floated down to them again.

“Oswald.”

Leaving the comfortable brightness of the kitchen Oswald mounted the narrow stairs. On the landing his name was vocalized again, more softly this time, for the listener had heard and counted every footstep so firmly planted to establish and sustain his courage, and knew him near at hand.

“Oswald.”

He passed into the bedroom through the door left partly open for the reduction of loneliness and for free communication with the maternal vigilance below, and made his way to the little brass-railed bed, beyond the defensive bigger bed, from which the voice had emanated. There he stretched out his arms in the darkness to where two smaller, softer, warmer outspread arms awaited them. At the first contact the head of the Sausage-Boy was drawn down almost fiercely into the dark shelter of a tiny bosom in which a tiny heart was throbbing fast. The arms encompassing his neck closed upon it with the energy of despair. His face was kissed persistently with lips that emitted breaths of curious hotness, and though within the depths of this embrace all was pitchy dark and Oswald had his eyes closed for sufferance of his sister’s caresses--his lips reciprocating kissing sounds for every kiss bestowed upon him--he knew the kisses were but a substitute for tears, and his name at each reutterance partook more and more of a plaintive and liquid character.

“Did you ... did you see anything, Oswald?” the fervent lips demanded, and the arms made as if to hug the information out of him.

He said evasively: “Some cabs.”

“Going.... There?”

“I think so.”

There was a sniff. And then:

“Did you see inside?”

“Not very well.”

“Were there any little girls inside?”

“One or two.”

“All dressed up?”

“Yes.”

“How big were they? As big as me?”

“Some of them.”

There was a second sniff. And after awhile a third. And Oswald felt the little bosom shake and quiver like a boiled pudding in its pan. He said, “Never mind, Beryl. Don’t cry!” But there was a something hardening in his own throat too, and behind his eyes was the sting of fire. “To-morrow we will go with mother to the market.” Something hot and liquid, like a bead of molten lead, escaped from his constricted eyelids and fell into the fevered bosom below. The sniffs stopped abruptly, and after an intent silence the treble voice, instinct with a new alertness, enquired:

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

A hot hand, leaving its place behind his neck, groped over his cheeks and explored his eyes.

“You’re crying too!” the voice charged him, with a satisfaction almost jubilant. “O, Oswald!”

The lump in his throat, growing bigger and more persistent, allowed him to make no denial. Melted by each other’s tears the Sausage Boy and his sister sniffed without dissimulation, savouring the ecstatic sadness of a sorrow shared.

It was a Friday, and Friday for the little Oswald took on the character of a very arduous day. It was a day, indeed, on which the work of trying to be a gentleman attained its weekly maximum. For two hours, or nearly, he had been traversing the streets of Daneborough, engrossed in the changeless yet ever changeful problem of how a gentleman should deal with knockers or ring bells too high for him--an anxious task calling for the nicest discrimination and skill. And all this, supplemented by his extra journey to the livery stables, and the tears shed over his sister’s nightdress, did not conclude his labours for the day. There still remained a further errand to perform--and that quickly, for the hands of the clock were moving menacefully to the hour of eight, and at eight o’clock Oswald (as a fully accredited chorister) was due to attend the weekly choir practice in the chancel of St. Saviour’s church.

The flour had disappeared from Mrs. Holmroyd’s hands when Oswald descended to the kitchen, and a capacious wicker basket stood upon the scoured deal table, which Mrs. Holmroyd was lining with a clean white napkin as he entered. She smoothed the creases of the folded cloth, replaced the slotted lid over the wicker handle and slid the handle over the arm that Oswald silently extended. That done, she took the woollen muffler from its place of airing on the fender; held it--first this side and then that--to the ruddy cheek of the fire, and testing its preparedness with a critical hand, enwrapped it once again round Oswald’s neck, tucking its fringed ends punctiliously beneath his jacket as before.

Whereupon, encouraged with an enquiring “Well, dear?” Oswald began his familiar Friday night’s recital--that custom had crystallized into a formula almost as invariable as the polite “Please ... Mother sends her compliments” with which he presented the weekly message on her behalf. Mrs. Dunster was obliged and would take a large porkpie but no sausages. Mrs. Lockford was obliged and would be glad to have a medium pie this week and a pound of sausages. Mrs. Hibbert was obliged, and they were getting tired of pork, but Oswald might call next Friday. Mrs. Fletcher was obliged....

The recital proceeded; the list of orders slowly grew. Only one eighteenpenny pie stood now between Oswald and Mrs. Bankett whom everybody knew. He drew his breath and his colour deepened. The fateful name was raised at last. Mrs. Bankett ... whom everybody knew....

Mrs. Bankett had ordered no pork pie. No sausages. Only a cab. His words hurried now with his admission as if they had been legs. “I ran to fetch it for them. When I got back it drove away. They went inside and shut the door. I waited for some time.... They never came to the door again.... I came home.”

His mother said “Without the money?” and gazed at him with a tragic and incredulous eye.

Without the money? Aye! Now he came to think of it, he had clean forgotten that. He had clean forgotten the payment for last week’s order that was to be relegated to this; the four and sixpence of such terrific consequence to the mother of a son studying hard to be a gentleman. The taste of the bitterness of failure came back again into his mouth like gall. He had defiled his mother’s trust in him. Her confidence in his ability had been betrayed....

She did not upbraid him as other mothers might have done. Too well she knew the bitter testament of the human heart--her own, and through her own, her son’s who was a living part of her and whose pains and sufferings she shared. She put her hand upon his shrinking shoulder and drew away the coat sleeve (with the wicker basket on it) lifted to his eyes as though to shield contrition from the sight of sorrow his cowardice had caused. “Never mind, Oswald. Never mind, dear. Mother is not angry with you. She is proud of you. You have done wonders. Mother can manage.... She can manage very well.”

He had done wonders. Mother could manage very well. But for all that it was a dubious eye that peered into the flabby crevices of mother’s purse, eliciting at last with finest use of forefinger and thumb some inconspicuous silver and three coppers. Three and ninepence in all.

Three and ninepence was very little for the work in hand, but it afforded the repentant Oswald an opportunity unparalleled to be a gentleman in earnest. Here was a chance indeed. With his three and ninepence in his tight right hand and this basket on his arm he could go firmly to the pork butcher’s ... to the pork butcher’s and say:

“Please, Mr. Waxford. Mother sends her compliments, and she wants just the same as she had last week. And here is three and ninepence....”

“ ... Three and ninepence....” Mother and son were looking fixedly into each other’s eyes by now, as Oswald’s lips repeated--or at least re-shaped--the words that issued from her. “ ... And ninepence. And if you please I will bring the rest of the money in the morning. Mother is rather short of change.”

Could he remember this message? He could. Could he repeat it? He could and did, in a chill and conscientious undertone animated by no more expression than a leg of mutton freshly drawn from cold store. The coinage so recently collected with such care and dubiously looked at was softly pressed into his unresisting hand. The cap was placed upon his head. Mother was short of change. It would be quite all right. Mr. Waxford would understand.

Ah! this sad profession of trying to be a gentleman, that difficilizes every act of life and makes cowardice so dreadful. Not even to his mother dared this quaking paladin confess the mockery of his valour. He assumed the insignia of her misplaced confidence in him and went out, wondrously, into the mist once more.

This time he performed his errand with a curious sense of detachment, speculating impersonally as to the fate of it. His visit to the livery stables and his defeat at Mrs. Bankett’s had broken his nerve. The vow that his craven courage tried to register and animate was but a feeble lifeless thing, the mere skimmed milk of resolution, all its strength and goodness lacking. He held his mother’s love and trust on false pretences. And if anything were needed to convince despondency of its unworthiness it was the sight of Waxford’s shop. What brilliance! What publicity! What merciless exposure of shrinking purpose and deceptive ends were here.

Think of a row of close serried naked gas-burners, twelve to the foot at least; all stertorously puffing out their bluey yellow flames into the night over a double front of plate-glass windows divided by a shop door, the slightest waft of air serving to enrage them and rouse them to a roar. Now they go blue, to the point of extinction, like a mendicant’s lips in winter. Now a glissando ripple runs up and down their extended gamut. Now the entire row bursts out into the exuberance of irrepressible activity; a seething, hissing line of flame that seems to set the whole shop front in motion and galvanizes all its white and pendent carcasses into a lurid danse macabre. There must have been a dozen porcine corpses suspended from the bright steel hooks along the glazed shop wall within; their heads downward; their countenances fixed in a ghastly stereotyped, sardonic risus; their nostrils dripping red blood into the sawdust heaped below each muzzle, as they awaited their momentous metamorphosis into modes of human life. Freed from the sin, the sloth, the gluttony of their purely animal existence they would turn to all sorts of things. The loins of this one might be translated into love; the ribs of that other might reappear on Sunday transfigured as a sermon, denouncing vice and propagating dogma. To-day they were but pork; to-morrow they would put on humanity, assume the substance of mankind, become incorporate partners in man’s very soul; fortifiers of his faith; heritors, with him, of his glorious immortality.

To the little Oswald, attached with conscientious might and main to three and ninepence and the wicker basket, this spectacle of twelve impassive corpses--all of one size, all of one semblance, all reduced to a grizzled uniformity in death, their once voracious stomachs cleft and emptily outspread for public edification as if they preached a sermon protestive of the vanity of all things earthly--impressed his susceptibilities less than the gas-blanched mortuary in which they hung. More terrible than these twelve impassive blood-sealed jurors to him were the roaring lights without, that seemed to hiss and mock his courage; the pallid opal globes within, blazoning in sable capitals the name of Waxford. The callous ostentation of the shop dismayed him with its gleaming scales of brass and marble; its hooks and implements of spotless steel; its chopping-block of scoured and scalded cleanliness; its sawdust sprinkled floor, and last and dreadfullest of all--its proprietor’s obese and proper person, arrayed in Friday’s immaculate white vestments, unstained as yet by grease or gore; the starched and snowy tunic protracted by the not less snowy apron which--drawn tightly round his nether quarters--made no appreciable indentation on his noble convexity. By some process of assimilation as yet imperfectly understood by scientists or theologians, much intimacy and close association with the world of pork had brought the rotund Waxford into striking physical conformity with what he dealt in. His eyes, deep sunk within their fleshy orbits, presented a glazed and porcine stare; his ears were large and hispid; his flesh possessed a bleached and waxen character curiously akin to that of the twelve inverted apostles lining his white-tiled wall. Slung up by his heels to the steel rod, with his head and forepaws to the floor, and his internal economy spread open to inspection on a cambrel, he might have cut no despicable figure in competition with the carcasses displayed to-night. As he stood, filling the shop door with his bulk, one hand immersed in the spacious pocket of his apron, where it toyed indolently with a copious provision of loose change, he was a form to strike dismay into the heart of three and ninepence. Three and ninepence, indeed, asked itself fearfully where the courage requisite to disturb that breadth of abdomen was coming from, and had not yet received its answer from heaven when the Waxford gaze, proprietorially roaming over the area of public roadway annexed from darkness by his blazing burners to form an extension of his business, fell at last upon the wicker basket on the irresolute right arm and lay there with such a substantial weight of look as almost to bow the basket down. The eye--that small, sagacious, active eye--recognized the Holmroyd basket in a trice, and read the meaning of that tightly folded hand. Out of the creases in his voluminous neck emerged a voice: peremptory, decisive.

“Now my lad!” it said, and without dissimulation my lad stepped forth. Who was three and ninepence to withstand a summons such as this.

Three and ninepence, turning itself over and over along with Mother’s compliments, all in a tropical and coppery sweat, followed the surpliced proprietor into his place of business (that only by default of a few water-sprays and some chloride of lime fell short of being a morgue) where the Waxford assistant industriously rotated the handle of a galvanized iron mincing machine.

“Please ... Mother sends her compliments ... and she wants ... just the same ... as she had last week....”

The message broke off abruptly as if by its own weight. Three and ninepence awaited horror-struck for an amendment that never came. Even the gas-globes blinked incredulously and rolled protesting eyes; the assistant applied himself blindly to the galvanized iron mincer as if staggered and appalled. Only Waxford made no sign. Only Waxford preserved his imperturbability, saying he knew what Mrs. Holmroyd wanted well enough. “Give us hold of your basket, boy.”

In the most appalling silence, unbroken by a word, three and ninepence saw the awful activities precipitated by its rash pronouncement. Knives were sharpened with a clash and gleam of deadly steel; glittering choppers rose and fell; the brass and marble scales oscillated with tremulous irresolution before Waxford’s judicial eye. Something was swept from the liberated balance and inhumed by Waxford’s busy fingers in Oswald’s basket. The white cloth was wrapped like a winding sheet about these committed remains, the lid was replaced.

“There, my lad!” said Waxford at the conclusion of this brief but impressive ceremony. “That’s a bit of lovely stuff, tell your mother. She won’t beat it anywhere in this town. Seven and elevenpence.” A white and puffy palm, gleaming with the grease of its recent labours grew forthwith to gigantic proportions and eclipsed the basket beneath Oswald’s gaze. Chink, chink, chink, chink. Coin by coin three and ninepence took laborious leave of its temporary owner and passed into the extended palm that would have made half a dozen three and ninepences look puny.

“Three and six,” (the voice of Waxford continued) “and seven.... Three and eight. And one’s nine.” He gave the coinage a shake as if to jog the payer’s memory and expedite completion. “Three and nine, my lad. And seven and eleven the skins and pork.--Is that all you’ve brought with you?” For the Sausage Boy had raised a quick imploring face to the face above him, and relapsed upon an abject “yes” that all his members uttered rather than his lips.

With a man of less experience and resource than Waxford who knows how long they might have preserved their two respective attitudes: this one with averted eyes: that one with inverted hand? Nay, given but another minute who shall say that the thought so fruitlessly beating against the closed walls of Oswald’s brain might not have been heroically rescued by his tongue at last? But the individual confronting him was unfettered by any futile gentlemanly feelings--as the prosperity of his business and the twelve apostles testified. All these legs and sides of pork, these spiral stacks of vermilion boloneys, these bloated blood puddings and basins of glutinous brawn, these strings of anaemic sausages, these trays of scraped ears and translucent trotters, these bladders of lard--bald and resplendent as the dome of Waxford’s head--had not been assembled with such profusion in this place by qualities of sentiment and diffidence. Their owner clapped the three and ninepence on the counter beside the glittering scales and said: “You’re short, my lad. You’d best run home and fetch the rest. Seven and elevenpence tell your mother, and you’ve brought me three and nine. You needn’t bother to take the basket. I’ll take care of it for you till you come back.”

The order, uttered without the least heat, brooked no contention. It was a plain precept according to the first principles of sound business. Three and ninepence--that was not three and ninepence any longer, but only heartache wrapped up in a muffler--stood confounded for one moment. The next it stole silently from the shop.

Again Oswald took hold of the familiar doorknob with both his hands and turned it beneath the pressure of an overburdened bosom. Again he let himself into the narrow passage with the chink of light drawn like a chalk-line down the right hand wall. Again he was greeted by name; the chalk-line widened to a rectangle of light; his mother, once more floury of forearm, came out into the passage to welcome him. Her voice and her insufferable tender smile--falling on a bosom charged with sorrow to its brim--made grief overflow. Without a word, without a look, he passed into the kitchen; chose the far-most chair; turned his face to the wall, with his arm laid on the chair back and his nose buried in his coat sleeve, and wept inconsolably.

It had come at last, this horrible exposure. Fruitlessly he had battled with it, fought against it, seeing the inevitable evil draw nearer week by week. Now the doom had fallen; he sat disgraced. He had wronged most wickedly his mother’s love. She knew; she knew. Her smile had been a sword of flame, plunged hilt-deep in the bowels of his delinquency. Every object in the house knew his disgrace and scorned him. The Swiss clock ticking on the mantelpiece withdrew its voice severely as though it ticked no longer for unworthy Oswalds and kept no time for those who put time to so little profit. The chair he sat on offered contrition an uncomfortable seat. The sharp edge of its rail cut into the arm reposing on it; the wall repulsed his forehead for all the world as if it cried: “Away! I will have no concern with cowards.” He was disgraced, disowned, deserted. And woefully he wept.

At first the suasive softness of his mother’s voice, the tender supplication of her arms, inspired but a more obstinate refusal of the lips to put their cause for weeping into words or let the rim of comfort’s proffered cup come near them.

But little by little, by monosyllables at a time, trouble was fished up from her watery depths, and Mrs. Holmroyd learned the truth of all these tears. They stirred remorse, not anger. Her mother’s heart, smitten through this comprehensible sorrow of her son’s, turned swiftly on itself. The fault was hers, not his. She had been heedless of his years. The tasks imposed on him were all too heavy for such slender shoulders; too heavy on occasions for her own. Her conscience, self accused, confessed a cowardice more culpable than his; a cowardice that went disguised too frequently as love, concealed behind the subterfuge of kisses, professing pride and trust in him--that all the while were but tricks to trade upon affection and rouse in his small breast the courage lacking in her own. Had she ignored the spectre over-shadowing this evening’s errand? Did she not see, committing to his hand the dreadful three and ninepence and to his lips the still more dreadful message, her own dismay reflected out of Oswald’s eyes? Was it fair to make her son the agent of commissions such as these because his guilelessness lacked lips to confess fear and owned but eyes, beseeching to be read?

Save for a cruel providence his feet were never meant to run the gutters. He was no errand boy (protesting conscience told her) unhampered by pride and undeterred by truth; no common runner of the roads to whom all streets were home; no blushless ringer of bells and hardened rapper of knockers. He was his father’s son condemned to tasks for which his gentleness was never fitted. The arms she wound about his neck were contrite arms. The tears she spilled were tears of impotence and pity, to think her love could help so little. Surely an all-wise, merciful and loving Father might in His wisdom have devised some better means to manifest His care of her and hers. Sorrow may be, as pietists allege, the soul’s true sustenance, by feeding upon which it groweth godlike. But sorrow too--as well she was aware--can be a mean and pettifogging thing; a blister on the heel of aspiration that, for all its paltriness, causes the noblest aim to limp. To sustain a spacious sorrow is heroic; to resist some great temptation may be noble; but daily to adjust small means to little ends teaches the soul to stoop. The tallest stature may be lowered at last, and lofty thoughts lose their uprightness that are daily subject to mean necessities. Like the constant threading of fine needles the spiritual eyesight compelled to read life’s petty print too closely loses its larger vision and risks becoming blind to God.

All this and more moved in the mind of Oswald’s mother as she clasped her son. But grief is a quality hopelessly unpractical. Grief is for the opulent and leisured, who have the time for its indulgence and the wealth to buy for it the luxuries it needs. Combat with a selfish world (she feared) had made this mother very practical. Sometimes so sadly practical that she must weep in privacy to think how changed she was. She thought now of the absent basket and resolutely dried her eyes.

The dreadful practical part of her worked out a sordid sum in subtraction. Three and nine from seven and elevenpence. Nine from eleven, two; three from seven, four. Four shillings and twopence. Four shillings and twopence she needed. Oswald’s eyes were fixed upon her now; she would avenge his tears and re-instate his honour, cost what it might. Decisively she doffed her overall, drew down her sleeves, assumed her hat and mantle, and--first commending the house to Oswald’s sacred care--went out into the November mist.

The clock struck eight. At the Mansion House those chosen children would be joyful. In the chancel of St. Saviour’s (prodigious and appalling thought) the choir practice had begun. On Waxford’s counter the interned pork slept dreamlessly in its cotton shroud, unexpectant and unperturbed.

The resolution displayed by Oswald’s mother had not a lengthy journey to sustain. No lengthier, indeed, than to the next door--whither she betook herself with a firm step and a courage that the night air had not time to cool. Whatever may be, in other ways, alleged against it, the darkness is friendly to errands such as this. Under night’s indulgent mantle neighbourly borrowing loses much of its terror; although as an offset to this advantage, we must remember that it is not less easy to refuse a favour than to ask one, in the dark. And for all Mrs. Holmroyd’s confidence, she poised her uplifted knuckles with something more than deliberation before the panels of the next door, rehearsing her summons once or twice, with the nicest assessment of force necessary, before the fingers fell.

The summons that ensued betrayed her. At a crisis, it seemed, she was no surer than her son. The knock confessed itself the furtive suppliant’s knock; the ingratiatory knuckle-usage of one with a favour to ask. The bearer of a benefit, the repayer of a loan, the bringer of good tidings, rap resolutely, joyously. The act is confident and free, not furtive and repressed, burdened with the fear of knocking too loud lest it raise expectation over high within.

Oswald had rapped three times at Jobling’s. His mother rapped as many here before her summons reached the remote and dormant consciousness of the house. Slippered footsteps trod untidily towards the door, guided in the darkness by hands that slid along alternate walls. Her eyes, now capable of differentiating the degrees of darkness, knew when the door opened by reason of the deeper dark beyond--for all it opened very little. No wider, indeed, than to make way for a peering and suspicious nose that sniffed the outer darkness without a sound, as if it had been a rat. Since the nose remained motionless and the door betrayed no disposition to open wider, Mrs. Holmroyd--with a quickening of the heart beneath her mantle--spoke at last.

“I’m sorry to trouble you, Mrs. Kenway,” she said. The voice was soft, and in its polite depression singularly like her son’s.

The nose, under this assurance, grew to half a forehead and one eye.

“What! Is that you, Mrs. Holmroyd?” And receiving Mrs. Holmroyd’s answer that it was, became a whole head and part of a bosom, whilst the voice--casting its uncertainty aside--assumed a geniality almost dreadful to the soul of a borrower. Its note of welcome pitched a major key too high; a tone too bold for borrowing to sustain. Skilful modulation would be necessary to lead the theme, yet undeclared, into the confidential minor. “Why, bless me’m!” cried the head and bosom. “I made sure I couldn’t mistake your voice, Mrs. Holmroyd. Step your ways in, marm.” The invitation, loudly tendered, that accompanied the flinging open of the door--as though the earlier suspicion renounced all further need to exercise itself--struck courage in the face. Courage, dismayed by such utter confidence reposed in it, shrank hurriedly from an invitation so compromising to purpose.

“I only just called, Mrs. Kenway....”

“Come in, marm; come in!” the voice repeated. “You’re very welcome. There’s no need to apologize I’m sure. Don’t stand outside in the damp.”

“Thank you ... thank you,” Mrs. Holmroyd said. “But I didn’t really wish to trouble you. I only just called to....”

“You’re not troubling me, Mrs. Holmroyd. I’m not to a minute,” urged the insistent voice. “We don’t see much of one another, for all we’re such near neighbours. I was only saying so to my husband this dinner time. Do step forwards, marm.”

Again courage and politeness strove to escape the paralyzing toils of misplaced friendship; begging to be excused; alleging household obligations and the need for haste. Mrs. Holmroyd had just called.... Her little boy....

“Aye, to be sure,” the voice agreed, which by its insistent geniality proclaimed that it suspected nothing and was animated by no more hopeful motive than friendliness and a love of gossip. “Your little boy’s got back, marm. I felt sure I heard your front door shut and you calling of him by name a while ago. I thought it must be him. Voices sounds quite plain through the passage wall. I often hear your little girl call out to you after you’ve put her to bed. They’ve not gone to Mayor’s Party then. I’ve not been home very long myself. A friend of mine’s little son and daughter got an invite, and she asked me to go and see them before they went. Real bonny they looked.... My word! Hasn’t there been some cabs! I don’t know what _you_ think about it, Mrs. Holmroyd,” the voluble voice pursued, “but I’ve heard a deal of complaints. Why, I know a case myself. Seven in a family, and not a single invite. Me and you pays rates and taxes same as anybody else, and they don’t forget us when it’s gas or water at quarter’s end. But let it be parties and My Word! They don’t ask _us_ to go to Mansion House and look at childer dancing!”

The current of her genial indignation swept on. It was a strong tide for a mere borrower to stem. Mrs. Holmroyd, supporting her bosom with one hand beneath her mantle, yielded to the wordy flood, her purpose submerged and foundering, her strength and resolution almost spent. Once or twice her courage faltered. Invention sought to fabricate some motive for this visit more consonant with pride. But such unworthy subterfuge would be false to Oswald. Could she, thereafter, face her son? It was curious how their two places were now reversed; how she feared the clearness of her son’s eyes, the judgment of his unspoken reproaches as he had feared hers; how she made her duty towards him, his confidence in her, the test and mainspring of her present conduct. And, blindly breasting the verbal current at last, she struck the dreaded shore and delivered her lips of the purpose that had embarrassed them so long. Not one listener in a thousand, possibly, (and in the dark) could have divined what motive force was requisite to articulate these polite and gentle words: “I wonder if I might venture to trouble you, Mrs. Kenway.... If you would be so kind....”

The request, squeezed from her reluctant mouth as if it had been blood, drew to its completion. In thought it had been dreadful; in speech more dreadful still. Five shillings, insinuated thus, seemed almost sinister. Her heart recoiled from this creation of her lips. This bastard offspring, fathered by necessity, shamed her. Furtive and mean it bespoke its dreadful parentage even in the dark. As it left her lips she was shamefully aware of a sudden alteration in the stillness. Some door of interest, she felt, had been abruptly closed. Where her words, before, had sunk into the bosom of a receptive geniality they were now repelled as from a sounding-board. “I’m sorry, marm,” the darkness in the doorway said, and there was a subtle alteration in its tone as if the damp had chilled it. The voice had quitted its original key and was now descended into a key more regretfully minor than Mrs. Holmroyd’s own.

“O, pray ...” Mrs. Holmroyd quickly begged, “ ... don’t mention it, Mrs. Kenway.”

“Very sorry, marm,” the darkness repeated, showing somewhat less bosom than before. “--Did I understand you to say five shillings, Mrs. Holmroyd?”

The question was asked in a tone that let it be clearly understood it owned a motive no more than formally polite.

“It is no matter, Mrs. Kenway,” Oswald’s mother answered. “Yes ... I did mention that amount. It would have been a slight convenience. But pray don’t trouble. I merely thought ... Friday is rather an awkward night.”

The figure in the dark agreed with hearty compliance that Friday was an awkward night. Everybody (she reflected) found the same. She was very sorry indeed, marm. But her husband not being at home just then, and her having to do a bit of shopping shortly, you see.... Why! There. Mrs. Holmroyd would know how it was.

Mrs. Holmroyd knew thoroughly how it was. Knew too well how it was.

“Otherwise ...” the voice suggested, throwing open a vague doorway to the possibilities. Mrs. Holmroyd concurred with a rapid “To be sure ... to be sure. Please forgive me for having troubled you. I only thought.... It is really of no consequence. How damp it is to-night.”

It really did not matter. It was of no consequence. The three and ninepence by Waxford’s scales, the basket on his counter, the sausage and pork pies ordered, as yet all unbegun, her little Oswald keeping vigil on the kitchen chair--they did not matter. They were of no consequence.

Despite her growing practical-mindedness so frequently deplored, she was, at base, no bolder than her boy.

She let herself into her home with a due regard for the neighbourly vigilance, immuring herself not so noiselessly as to betray to these tell-tale walls a purpose defeated or a conscience shamed. For a moment after entry she stood, preserving the attitude of an anxious and expectant listener. But no voice acknowledged her return. Within was silence, so nicely graduated to her ear that it seemed almost deathly. Strange terrors take their toll of true maternal hearts. She tore the veil of silence urgently aside as if it were a sheet that draped some shape indefinite and dreadful, saying:

“Oswald!”

“Yes, mother.”

At that she drew breath of reassurance again. Thankfulness returned with courage, in a tide. Her joy to find him safe was almost great enough to sweep away the memory of her recent ordeal. She advanced with an exultant confidence begotten of her son’s voice. At least she had Him. Him, and that other--not less dear--above. Within these walls was happiness indeed; a happiness made all the brighter by the darkness of the world without; a treasure that her soul guarded the more zealously because she knew it assailed.

Oswald sat where she had left him, on the wooden chair, before all this paraphernalia for the interrupted manufacture of pies. Traces of beknuckled tears still gleamed on his cheek-bones, but he had exchanged the attitude of despair for one of speculation, and his countenance expressed enquiry more than grief.

His mother entered the kitchen with a smile he had known before--though its precise significance he did not understand--the smile wrung out of adversity that, but for her children, might have been tears all told.

“Did Beryl call out to you whilst I was away, Oswald?”

“No mother.”

“I want you to take care of the house for mother a little longer, Oswald.”

She noted his eyes’ quick reference to the clock, and her glance faltered as his own had done. “Ten minutes past eight already! I had no idea. You will be late for the choir practice, Oswald.”

Late for the practice? Did his mother really mean to impose this further burden upon his unequal shoulders? She saw the courage die out of his face like an extinguished taper, and added hastily: “But to-night you cannot go. Mother cannot spare you, Oswald.” She made pretence to appeal to his magnanimity. “You will not mind for once, will you dear? It is for _mother’s_ sake.”

He sniffed, touched to the very depths of his ardent hypocrisies by the appeal. O! what a hypocrite he was. O! what a hypocrite he knew himself to be.

When Mrs. Holmroyd accosted the November mist once more she bore beneath her mantle something of whose identity her son knew nothing, though his eye was vaguely conscious of its presence. He was aware she held some object of a just perceptible bulk against her bosom, for she had but one hand to lay upon his neck in going. And whatever the hidden bulk might be--not that his curiosity was sensibly stirred, for he was still at the age that reposes its implicit faith in a mother’s wisdom and goodness--the object had small significance, for she told him as his eye rested on it: “It is nothing, Oswald. Mother will be back soon.”

Always before to-night, in the times of stress, (and for Oswald’s mother such times had not been lacking) she had registered and had kept her vow, that to this dire remedy she should never have recourse, fearful lest its specious efficacy might enslave her to the habit and lead her into evils deeper than those from which she sought relief. Crises as acute as this she had surmounted before, but the citadel does not always fall to the fiercest onslaught. It falls as frequently to some half-hearted after-sally, when the powers of resistance are at ebb.

Much the same way she took as that which Oswald had taken earlier, when his uncertain footsteps led him to Waxford’s shop. But before Waxford’s flaring frontage could challenge purpose or arrest courage she turned down one of the shorter side streets into a region where all the streets (or so it seemed) were side-streets--short and mean and lightless--and came to a halt at last before the gable of a small and questionable shop.

The shop was a corner shop, its door sunk in the angle of adjoining walls that made a salient eave above it. On either side, one in this street and one in that, two shabby submerged windows let out a shabby light. The door between them, whose upper half was rectangled into six panes of dirty glass, let out light of the same shabby quality, from the same shabby source, that a peep above the red curtains draping its lower panes showed to be an oillamp suspended from a darkened beam. From the ceiling of which this beam formed part there hung a host of things more sombre than the lamp. Garments they seemed to be: dingy overcoats and skirts, and boots and shoes in clusters, like the corpses of apparel that had made away with themselves. From the shop floor stacks of other lifeless clothing rose to meet them. The windows, too, were cumbered with the ghastly company of apparel; the very putting-off of extremity and despair, yet offered still again to clad the limbs of living wretchedness and lend chill warmth to miserable blood. Well might the spectacle of such a shop send a shiver down Mrs. Holmroyd’s spine. This way was never meant for her. O! never, never meant for her. To cross such a threshold was to forfeit something of the cherished purity of a soul; to touch contamination; to part with somewhat of that principle which keeps life sweet and conscience clean.

She looked this way. She looked that. God knew it was no crime she contemplated; only an act of sacrifice. She laid her hand impulsively upon the brazen doorlatch, worn bright by the application of many fingers, and chose her moment for the fateful Now.

Relieved of that incriminating burden borne beneath her mantle--which when unwrapped at length, declared itself to be a silver creamjug--the mother of Oswald emerged from this degraded place of dreadful barterings. Whilst she had stood without, all terror seemed resident within. Now, hesitating on the threshold of external darkness, all terror seemed without. Not till she had spurned the poisonous latch like an infected hand and flung herself into the bosom of the mist deep beyond every contact with the tainted yellow light, did reassurance return. With each step taken pride repossessed itself; she regained control of her breathing; dared at last to raise her head.

The roaring gas-jets, all flickering up and down the garish Waxford frontage, occasioned her no tremor. Her chin rose defiantly before the blast of flame. Tempered in that fiercer forge, her courage faced such fires as these undaunted. How had this vulgar creature dared to take advantage of her son!

By this time public interest had begun to respond to the animated blowing of these pursed and fiery lips. The greasy cleaver had chopped its way as far as the third apostle, and it was rising and falling with remorseless energy before the eyes of an attentive audience when Mrs. Holmroyd entered the shop. The sight of Waxford added to her stature, and lent a further assertiveness to her chin. Some guilty premonition passed through his frame as she approached and paralyzed his fleshy arm, for with the cleaver already raised the purpose in his hardened muscles faltered all at once and failed. The chopper descended harmlessly upon the block, and the hand that held it was swift to seize the confiscated basket. The gesture interpreted apology.

“ ... Your basket, marm.”

Mrs. Holmroyd acknowledged ownership with dignified reserve. At least the offending Waxford had a more discriminating eye than that other before which she had so lately quailed. He could distinguish a lady from mere womankind, even though the lady was reduced to come upon her own errand at an hour of the night when ladies, strictly speaking, were supposed to be at home. The tribute of his polite discernment tended to allay her indignation. Perhaps Oswald’s diffidence had been, to some extent, at fault. Certainly the porcine Waxford lacked none of the essentials of deference to Oswald’s mother. She began, “My little boy ...” as a prelude to reproof, but Waxford’s politeness (not altogether at its ease) insisted on sparing her the trouble of an explanation. “To be sure, marm,” he told her, wiping the handle of the basket on the corner of his no longer quite spotless apron, and cleaning his fingers in turn: all ten of them, for the due manipulation of a lady’s change. He quite understood. Her little boy had come without the money, and gone away to fetch it before Waxford could stop him, leaving the basket behind. He was sorry, marm ... could he send the pork for her? Alfred, take hold of this here basket and carry it for this here lady. It would be no trouble, marm. Just as she pleased, marm. Alfred, put the basket down again. The lady prefers to take it with her.

The quarter-jack from St. Gyles’s chimed out the last quarter before nine as Mrs. Holmroyd walked hurriedly along the moist and sometimes greasy flags. All the agony of those recent moments fused, as she walked, into a transcendent calm. For once again the sacred home was saved. In a life built on such frail foundations and compounded of such fragile things, the least shock threatened disaster. And this failure of her weekly output of savouries would have thrown all her careful calculations out of truth; would have involved her in an endless train of embarrassments ridiculous and tragic.

Now she could return swiftly, joyously to the bosom of her family, to taste once more--after such bitter moments of separation--the true sweetness of home, and build up--whilst she baked--fresh dreams of hope and liberty for those she loved.