a little fresh for them to rest on of a Sunday.  During the three months of his happy survival at Cocker’s after her consent to their engagement she had often asked herself what it was marriage would be able to add to a familiarity that seemed already to have scraped the platter so clean.  Opposite there, behind the counter of which his superior stature, his whiter apron, his more clustering curls and more present, too present, h’s had been for a couple of years the principal ornament, he had moved to and fro before her as on the small sanded floor of their contracted future.  She was conscious now of the improvement of not having to take her present and her future at once.  They were about as much as she could manage when taken separate.

She had, none the less, to give her mind steadily to what Mr. Mudge had again written her about, the idea of her applying for a transfer to an office quite similar—­she couldn’t yet hope for a place in a bigger—­under the very roof where he was foreman, so that, dangled before her every minute of the day, he should see her, as he called it, “hourly,” and in a part, the far N.W. district, where, with her mother, she would save on their two rooms alone nearly three shillings.  It would be far from dazzling to exchange Mayfair for Chalk Farm, and it wore upon her much that he could never drop a subject; still, it didn’t wear as things had worn, the worries of the early times of their great misery, her own, her mother’s and her elder sister’s—­the last of whom had succumbed to all but absolute want when, as conscious and incredulous ladies, suddenly bereft, betrayed, overwhelmed, they had slipped faster and faster down the steep slope at the bottom of which she alone had rebounded.  Her mother had never rebounded any more at the bottom than on the way; had only rumbled and grumbled down and down, making, in respect of caps, topics and “habits,” no effort whatever—­which simply meant smelling much of the time of whiskey.

CHAPTER II

It was always rather quiet at Cocker’s while the contingent from Ladle’s and Thrupp’s and all the other great places were at luncheon, or, as the young men used vulgarly to say, while the animals were feeding.  She had forty minutes in advance of this to go home for her own dinner; and when she came back and one of the young men took his turn there was often half an hour during which she could pull out a bit of work or a book—­a book from the place where she borrowed novels, very greasy, in fine print and all about fine folks, at a ha’penny a day.  This sacred pause was one of the numerous ways in which the establishment kept its finger on the pulse of fashion and fell into the rhythm of the larger life.  It had something to do, one day, with the particular flare of importance of an arriving customer, a lady whose meals were apparently irregular, yet whom she was destined, she afterwards found, not