with a peculiarly offensive perkishness.  Poor Pennyloaf was in a great degree responsible for the ills of her married life; not only did she believe Bob to be the handsomest man who walked the earth but in her weakness she could not refrain from telling him as much.  At the present moment he was intensely self-conscious; with Pennyloaf’s eye upon him, he posed for effect.  The idea of forbidding future intercourse with Jane had come to him quite suddenly; it was by no means his intention to make his order permanent, for Jane had now and then brought little presents which were useful, but just now he felt a satisfaction in asserting authority.  Jane should understand that he regarded her censure of him with high displeasure.

‘You don’t mean that, Bob?’ murmured Pennyloaf.

’Of course I do.  And let me catch you disobeying me!  I should think you might find better friends than a girl as used to be the Peckovers’ dirty little servant.’

Bob turned up his nose and sniffed the air.  And Pennyloaf, in spite of the keenest distress, actually felt that there was something in the objection, thus framed!  She herself had never been a servant—­ never; she had never sunk below working with the needle for sixteen hours a day for a payment of ninepence.  The work-girl regards a domestic slave as very distinctly her inferior.

‘But that’s a long while ago,’ she ventured to urge, after reflection.

‘That makes no difference.  Do as I tell you, and don’t argue.’

It was not often that visitors sought Bob at his home of an evening, but whilst this dialogue was still going on an acquaintance made his arrival known by a knock at the door.  It was a lank and hungry individual, grimy of face and hands, his clothing such as in the country would serve well for a scarecrow.  Who could have recognised in him the once spruce and spirited Mr. Jack Bartley, distinguished by his chimney-pot hat at the Crystal Palace on Bob’s wedding-day?  At the close of that same day, as you remember, he and Bob engaged in terrific combat, the outcome of earlier rivalry for the favour of Clem Peckover.  Notwithstanding that memory, the two were now on very friendly terms.  You have heard from Clem’s lips that Jack Bartley, failing to win herself, ended by espousing Miss Susan Jollop; also what was the result of that alliance.  Mr. Bartley was an unhappy man.  His wife had a ferocious temper, was reckless with money, and now drank steadily; the consequence was, that Jack had lost all regular employment, and only earned occasional pence in the most various ways.  Broken in spirit, he himself first made advances to his companion of former days, and Bob, flattered by the other’s humility, encouraged him as a hanger-on.—­Really, we shall soon be coming to a conclusion that the differences between the nether and the upper world are purely superficial.

Whenever Jack came to spend an hour with Mr. and Mrs. Hewett, he was sure sooner or later to indulge the misery that preyed upon him and give way to sheer weeping.  He did so this evening, almost as soon as he entered.