she ever specially resented the other.  Tenderness, care, real solicitude for her well-being, she had never known, and had come to regard the unevenness of her life, vacillating between knocks and knick-knacks, with a blow one day and a jewel the next, as the condition of things which was natural to her.  When her father was dead she remembered for a while the jewels and the knickknacks, and forgot the knocks and blows.  But she was not beyond consolation, and she also found consolation in Mr Fisker’s visits.

‘I used to sign a paper every quarter,’ she said to Fisker, as they were walking together one evening in the lanes round Hampstead.

’You’ll have to do the same now, only instead of giving the paper to any one you’ll have to leave it in a banker...