She had lived happily at home till her father died, killed in an accident, when she had found herself on the world.  One brother was in the army, and the other brother, engaged in keeping a wife and eight children on twenty shillings a week and unsteady employment, could do nothing for her.  She had been out of London once in her life, to a place in Essex, twelve miles away, where she had picked fruit for three weeks:  “An’ I was as brown as a berry w’en I come back.  You won’t b’lieve it, but I was.”

The last place in which she had worked was a coffee-house, hours from seven in the morning till eleven at night, and for which she had received five shillings a week and her food.  Then she had fallen sick, and since emerging from the hospital had been unable to find anything to do.  She wasn’t feeling up to much, and the last two nights had been spent in the street.

Between them they stowed away a prodigious amount of food, this man and woman, and it was not till I had duplicated and triplicated their original orders that they showed signs of easing down.

Once she reached across and felt the texture of my coat and shirt, and remarked upon the good clothes the Yanks wore.  My rags good clothes!  It put me to the blush; but, on inspecting them more closely and on examining the clothes worn by the man and woman, I began to feel quite well dressed and respectable.

“What do you expect to do in the end?” I asked them.  “You know you’re growing older every day.”

“Work’ouse,” said he.

“Gawd blimey if I do,” said she.  “There’s no ’ope for me, I know, but I’ll die on the streets.  No work’ouse for me, thank you.  No, indeed,” she sniffed in the silence that fell.

“After you have been out all night in the streets,” I asked, “what do you do in the morning for something to eat?”

“Try to get a penny, if you ’aven’t one saved over,” the man explained.  “Then go to a coffee-’ouse an’ get a mug o’ tea.”

“But I don’t see how that is to feed you,” I objected.

The pair smiled knowingly.

“You drink your tea in little sips,” he went on, “making it last its longest.  An’ you look sharp, an’ there’s some as leaves a bit be’ind ’em.”

“It’s s’prisin’, the food wot some people leaves,” the woman broke in.

“The thing,” said the man judicially, as the trick dawned upon me, “is to get ‘old o’ the penny.”

As we started to leave, Miss Haythorne gathered up a couple of crusts from the neighbouring tables and thrust them somewhere into her rags.

“Cawn’t wyste ’em, you know,” said she; to which the docker nodded, tucking away a couple of crusts himself.