also the beginnings of a stairway.  The furniture of the reception-room comprised two chairs and a table, one or two saucepans, and some antique crockery.  What lay at the upper end of the stairway no living person knew, save the old woman who slept there.  The old woman sat at the fireplace, “all bunched up,” as they say in the Five Towns.  The only fire in the room, however, was in the short clay pipe which she smoked; Mrs Hullins was one of the last old women in Bursley to smoke a cutty; and even then the pipe was considered coarse, and cigarettes were coming into fashion—­though not in Chapel Alley.  Mrs Hullins smoked her pipe, and thought about nothing in particular.  Occasionally some vision of the past floated through her drowsy brain.  She had lived in that residence for over forty years.  She had brought up eleven children and two husbands there.  She had coddled thirty-five grand-children there, and given instruction to some half-dozen daughters-in-law.  She had known midnights when she could scarcely move in that residence without disturbing somebody asleep.  Now she was alone in it.  She never left it, except to fetch water from the pump in the square.  She had seen a lot of life, and she was tired.

Denry came unceremoniously in, smiling gaily and benevolently, with his bright, optimistic face under his fair brown hair.  He had large and good teeth.  He was getting—­not stout, but plump.

“Well, mother!” he greeted Mrs Hullins, and sat down on the other chair.

A young fellow obviously at peace with the world, a young fellow content with himself for the moment.  No longer a clerk; one of the employed; saying “sir” to persons with no more fingers and toes than he had himself; bound by servile agreement to be in a fixed place at fixed hours!  An independent unit, master of his own time and his own movements!  In brief, a man!  The truth was that he earned now in two days a week slightly more than Mr Duncalf paid him for the labour of five and a half days.  His income, as collector of rents and manager of estates large or small, totalled about a pound a week.  But, he walked forth in the town, smiled, joked, spoke vaguely, and said, “Do you?” to such a tune that his income might have been guessed to be anything from ten pounds a week to ten thousand a year.  And he had four days a week in which to excogitate new methods of creating a fortune.

“I’ve nowt for ye,” said the old woman, not moving.

“Come, come, now!  That won’t do,” said Denry.  “Have a pinch of my tobacco.”

She accepted a pinch of his tobacco, and refilled her pipe, and he gave her a match.

“I’m not going out of this house without half-a-crown at any rate!” said Denry, blithely.

And he rolled himself a cigarette, possibly to keep warm.  It was very chilly in the stuffy residence, but the old woman never shivered.  She was one of those old women who seem to wear all the skirts of all their lives, one over the other.