That night Elsie sat in the parlour (as she still to herself called the dining-room) by the gas-fire which she had lighted on her own responsibility. An act and a situation which a few days earlier, two days earlier, would have been inconceivable to her! But Joe\'s clothes had refused to dry in the kitchen; the gas-ring there was incapable of drawing the water out of them in the damp weather. Now they were dry; some of them were folded on a chair; upon these were laid the braces which she had given to him on his birthday, and which evidently he had worn ever since. To Elsie now these soiled and frayed braces had a magic vital quality. They seemed, far more than the clothes, to have derived from him some of his individuality, to be a detached part of him; she was sewing a button on the lifeless old trousers, and she had taken the button, and the thimble............