ather, Miss Hancock's dreams of the futur

necktie himself. Hitherto he had paid for his neckties and Patience had bought them, sombre neckties suitable to a lawyer and a celibate. This thing from Amery and

consols and the fall in Russian bonds, and his grumbles because the "bacon was fried to a cinder," just as she had watched and[Pg 32] listened for the last thirty years. Then, when h

arrayed in brown holland overalls; there were things in woolwork that Amelia Sedley might have worked, and abominations of art, deposited by the early Victorian age, struggled for pride of place with Geor

t atmosphere of gloom pervading the pictures of Hogarth. One understood[Pg 33] why, in that epoch, men drank deep, why women swooned and improved swooning into a fine art, why Society was generally beastly and brutal, and why great

wn satisfaction, took her parasol from the sta

charge made on the last leg of mutton but one. Having defeated the butcher, and tackled the other unfortunates and paid them, she paused near Mudie's Library as if in thought. Then she made direct for S

g

t of the common, heightened this expression of chronic astonishment into one of acute amazement. A rat in the office, a fall in the funds, a clerk giving notice to leave, any of these little incidents was sufficient to wreathe the countenance of Mr Bridgewater with an expression that would not have been out of place had he been gazing upon the ruins

ell on to the floor. She nodded to him, and, stepping over the papers, tapped with the handle of her parasol at the door of the inner

er own right.) Having obtained the loan and stropped her brother's temper to a fine edge, so that he was sharp with the clerks and irritable with the clients till luncheon time, Miss Hancock took herself

clop?dic head, and gazing in the direction of the doorw