"When will your father come back?" asked Charles as he returned to the kitchen, having deposited the man of law on his bed and shaken his fist in his face as a token of what he would get if he rose from it.

"Not till this evening, late," said Fanny.

"Then I must wait till he returns, or till this person recovers himself. I cannot possibly leave you alone in the house with a tipsy man."

"Oh yes, do stay till father returns. I want you to meet him so much," said Fanny, all her grief vanishing in smiles.

"Susannah, we'll have supper at eight."

"Yes, miss."

"I am almost glad," said Fanny, as she tripped up the kitchen stairs before her[Pg 87] cousin, "I am almost glad James took it into his head to get tipsy, you'd have gone away if he hadn't, without seeing father; it seems almost like Providence. Mercy! it's six o'clock."

She glanced at the great old hall clock ticking away the moments, even as it had done when George the Third was king, and Charles took his watch out to verify the time, but he did not catch the old clock tripping.

"Now we must think about supper," said Fanny, in a busy voice. "You must be dying of hunger. What do you like best?"

"But you have not dined, Fanny."

"Oh, we always call dinner 'luncheon,' and have it in the middle of the day; it saves trouble, and it is less worry." Then, after a moment's pause: "I wish we had a lobster, but I don't think there is one. I know there is a beefsteak."

She went to the kitchen stairs.

"Susannah!"

"Yes, miss," answered a dolorous voice from below.

"Have you a lobster in the house?"

"No, miss."

[Pg 88]

"You have a beefsteak?"

A sound came as of search amongst the plates on the dresser.

"The beefsteak is gone, Miss Fanny."

"Now, where can that beefsteak have gone to?" murmured the girl, whilst Charles called to mind the criminal countenances of the two faithful cats, and the business-like manner in which they had left the room.

"Search again, Susannah."

A frightful crash of crockery came as a reply.

"Susannah!"

"Yes, miss."

"Don't look any more, I will go out and buy something."

"Don't mind me," said Charles. "Anything will do for me; I am used—I mean——"

"I am not going to have father come back and find you starved to death; he'd kill me. I'm going out marketing; will you come?"

"With pleasure."

"Then wait till I fetch my hat and a basket."

"May I light a cigar?"

"Yes, smoke everywhere, every one does," and she rushed upstairs for her hat. A[Pg 89] moment later she returned, hat on head, and bearing in her hand a little basket adorned with blue ribbons: a pound of tea would have freighted it.

"How on earth is she going to get the dinner into that?" thought her companion, as he unbarred the hall door and followed her down the steps.

Then they found themselves walking down the weed-grown avenue, the birds twittering overhead in the light of the warm June evening.

That he should be going "a-marketing" in Highgate accompanied by a pretty girl with a basket did not, strangely enough, impress Charles Bevan as being an out-of-the-way occurrence.

He felt as if he had known the Lamberts for years—a good many years. He no longer contemplated the joyous tragedy of their life wholly as a spectator; he had become suddenly and without volition one of the actors, a subordinate actor—a thinking part, one might call it.

The fearful fascination exercised by these people seemed, strange to say, never so potent as when exercised upon hard-headed people,[Pg 90] as Major Sawyer and many another could have told.

"I love marketing," said Fanny, as they trudged along, "at least buying things."

"Have you any money?"

"Lots," said Miss Lambert, producing a starved-looking purse.

She opened it and peeped in at the three and sixpence it contained, and then shut it with a snap as if fearful of their escaping.

"What do you like next best to marketing?" asked Charles in the sedate voice of a heavy father speaking to his favourite child.

"Opening parcels."

"I don't quite——"

"Oh, you know—strange parcels when they come, or when father brings them, one never knows what may be in them—chocolate creams or what. I wonder what father will bring me back this time?"

"Where has he gone to?"

"He has gone to get some money."

"He will be back this evening?"

"Yes, unless he finds it difficult getting the money. If he does, he won't be home till morning." She spoke as an Indian squaw might speak, whose father or husband has[Pg 91] gone a-hunting, whilst Charles marvelled vaguely.

"But suppose—he doesn't get any money?"

"Oh, he will get it all right, people are so good to him. Poor, dear Mr Hancock——"

She stopped suddenly.

"Yes, yes."

"He said we weren't to tell."

She spoke in a secretive voice which greatly inflamed her companion's curiosity.

"You might tell me, but don't if you don't want to."

"Yes," said Fanny. "I don't think it matters now that you are friends with us, and we're all the same family. Father's dividends had not come in, and he lent us the money to pay the bills."

"What bills?"

"The butcher's bill, and Stokes the baker's bill, and the milk bill, and some others."

"Hancock lent you the money to pay your bills?" cried Charles, feeling like a person in a dream.

"Yes, old Mr Hancock, your Mr Hancock."

"But he never told me he was a friend of your father's; besides, he is my solicitor."

"He never saw us before this week."

[Pg 92]

"Tell me all about it, and how you came to know him so intimately, and how he paid your bills," commanded Mr Bevan.

There was, just here on the road, a seat dropped incontinently by the County Council; they sat upon it whilst she told her tale.

"It was the other day. Father had not slept all night thinking of the action. He came into my bedroom at two in the morning to tell me that if he lost it before the House of Lords, he would take it before the Queen in Council. He had been sitting up reading 'Every Man his Own Lawyer.' Well, next morning a lot of people came asking for their money, the butcher and all those, and we hadn't any.

"Father said it was all your fault, and he wished he had never seen the fish stream. I was so frightened by the way he was bothering himself about everything—for, as a rule, you know he is the most easy-tempered man in the world as long as he has got his pipe. Well, a friend advised me to go privately to your lawyer and try to stop the action. So I went to Mr Hancock.

"At first he seemed very stiff, and glared at me through his spectacles; but, after a while,[Pg 93] as I told him all about ourselves, he stopped shuffling his feet, and listened with his hand to his ear as if he were deaf, and he took a smelling bottle out of a drawer of his desk and snuffed at it, and said, 'Dear me, how very extraordinary!' Then he called me his 'Poor child!' and asked me had I had any luncheon. I said 'Yes,' though I hadn't—I wasn't hungry. Well, we talked and talked, and at last he said he would come back with me home, for that our affairs were in a dreadful condition and we didn't seem to know it. He said he would come as a friend and try to forget that he was a lawyer.

"Well, he came here with me. Father was upstairs in his bedroom, and I poked my head in and told him your lawyer wanted to see him in the drawing-room.

"I didn't tell him it was I who had fetched him, for I knew he would simply go mad if he thought I had been meddling with the action; besides, Mr Hancock said I had better not, as he simply called as a friend.

"Down came father and went into the drawing-room. I was in an awful fright, too frightened even to listen at the door. I made Susannah listen after a while, and she said[Pg 94] they were talking about roses—I felt so relieved.

"I sent Susannah in with wine, and Mr Hancock stayed to supper. After supper they had cigars and punch, and I played to them on the piano, and father sang Irish songs, and Mr Hancock told us awfully funny stories all about the law, and said he was a bachelor and envied father because he had a daughter like me.

"Then he talked about our affairs, and said he would require more punch before he could understand them; so he had more punch, and father showed him the housekeeping books, and he looked over them reading them upside down and every way. Then he wrote out a cheque to pay the books, with one eye shut, whilst father wrote out bills, you know, to pay the cheque, and then he kissed me and said good-bye to father and went away crying."

"But," cried Charles, utterly astounded at this artless revelation of another man's folly, "old Hancock never made a joke in his life—at least to me—and he's an awful old skinflint and never lent any man a penny, so they say."

"He made lots of jokes that night, anyhow,"[Pg 95] said Fanny, "and lent father over twenty pounds, too; and only yesterday a great bunch of hothouse flowers came from Covent Garden with his card for me."

"Old fool!" said Charles.

"He is not an old fool, he's a dear old man, and I love him. Come on, or the shops will be closed."

"You seem to love everything," said Mr Bevan in a rather stiff tone, as they meandered along near now to the street where shops were.

"I do—at least everything I don't hate."

"Whom do you hate?"

"No one just now. I never hate people for long, it is too much trouble. I used to hate you before I knew you. I thought you were a man with a black beard; you see I hadn't seen you."

"But, why on earth did you think I had a black beard?"

"I don't know. I suppose it was because I hate black beards."

"So you don't hate me?"

"No, indeed."

"And as every one you don't hate, you—— I say, what a splendid evening this is! it is just like Italy. I mean, it reminds me of Italy."

"And here are the shops at last," said[Pg 96] Fanny, as if the shops had been travelling to them and had only just arrived.

She stopped at a stationer's window.

"I want to get some envelopes. Come in, won't you?"

She bought a packet of envelopes for fourpence. Charles turned away to look at some of the gaudily-bound Kebles, Byrons, and Scotts so dear to the middle-class heart, and before he could turn again she had bought a little prayer-book with a cross on it for a shilling. The shopman was besetting her with a new invention in birthday cards when Charles broke the spell by touching her elbow with the head of his walking stick.

"Don't you think," said he when they were safely in the street, "it is a mistake buying prayer-books, these shop-keepers are such awful swindlers?"

"I bought it for Susannah," explained Fanny. "It's a little present for her after the way James has gone on. Look at this dear monkey."

A barrel organ of the old type was playing by the pavement, making a sound as if an old man gone idiotic were humming a tune to himself. A villainous-looking monkey on[Pg 97] the organ-top, held out his hand when it saw Fanny approaching. It knew the world evidently, or at least physiognomy, which is almost the same thing.

"He takes it just like a man," she cried, as the creature grabbed one of her pennies and then nearly broke its chain trying to get at her to tear the rose from her hat. "Look, it knows the people who are fond of it; it is just like a child."

Charles tore her from the monkey, only for a milliner's shop to suck her in.

"I must run in here for a moment, it's only about a corset I ordered; I won't be three minutes."

He waited ten, thinking how strange it was that this girl saw something attractive in nearly everything—strange cats, monkeys, and even old Hancock.

At the end of twenty minutes' walking up and down, he approached the milliner's window and peeped into the shop.

Fanny was conversing with a tall woman, whose frizzled black hair lent her somehow the appearance of a Frenchwoman.

The Highgate Frenchwoman was dangling something gaudy and flimsy before Fanny's[Pg 98] eyes, and the girl had her purse in her hand.

Charles gave a sigh, and resumed his beat like a policeman.

At last she came out, carrying a tissue-paper parcel.

"Well, have you got your—what you called for?"

"No, it's not ready yet; but I've got the most beautiful—Oh my goodness me!—how stupid I am!"

"What?"

"I have only three halfpence left, and I have forgotten the eggs and things for supper."

"Give me your purse, and let me look into it," he said, taking the little purse and turning away a moment. Then he handed it back to her; she opened it and peeped in, and there lay a sovereign.

"It's just what father does," she said, looking up in the lamp-light with a smile that somehow made Mr Bevan's eyes feel misty. "What makes you so like him in everything you do?" And somehow these words seemed to the correct Mr Bevan the sweetest he had ever heard.

[Pg 99]

Then they marketed after the fashion of youth when it finds itself the possessor of a whole sovereign. Fanny laying out the money as the fancy took her, and with the lavishness so conspicuously absent in the dealings of your mere millionaire.

They then returned to "The Laurels," Charles Bevan carrying the parcels.

The dining-room of "The Laurels" was a huge apartment furnished in the age of heavy dinners, when a knowledge of comparative anatomy and the wrist of a butcher were necessary ingredients in the composition of a successful host.

Here Susannah, to drown her sorrows in labour and give honour to the guest, had laid the supper things on a lavish scale. The Venetian vase, before-mentioned, stood filled with roses in the centre of the table, and places were laid for six—all sorts of places. Some of the unexpected guests were presumably to sup entirely off fish, to judge by the knives and forks set out for them, and some were evidently to be denied the luxury of soup. That there was neither soup nor fish mattered little to Susannah.

The cellar, to judge by the sideboard, had[Pg 100] been seized with a spirit of emulation begotten of the display made by the plate pantry, and had sent three representatives from each bin. The sideboard also co............