th a railway-map of England. He fretted to set
off at once. He had finished his business; he had nothing to do now
but eat an early dinner at his uncle's, and so start by the afternoon
train on the path of love, triumph, and success, leaving the boy,
coerced by ghastly threats, to take charge of the office in his
absence.

We have all seen a bird moulting, draggled, dirty, woebegone, not to
be recognised for the same bird, sleek and glossy in its holiday-suit
of feathers, pruning its wing for a flight across the summer sky. Even
so different was the Dorothea of the unkempt hair, the soapy arms, the
dingy apron, and the grimy face, from a gaudy damsel who emerged in
the afternoon sun out of Mr. Bargrave's chambers, bright with all the
colours of the rainbow, and scrupulously dressed, according to the
extreme style of the last prevailing fashion but two.

She was a good-looking woman enough now that she had "cleaned
herself," as she expressed it, but for a certain roughness of hair,
coarseness of skin, and general redundancy of outline, despite of
which drawbacks, however, she attracted many admiring glances from
cab-drivers, omnibus-conductors, a precocious shoeblack, and the
policeman on duty, as she tripped into Holborn and mingled with the
living stream that flows unceasingly down that artery of London.

Dorothea seemed to know where she was going well enough, and yet the
coarse red cheek turned pale while she approached her goal, though it
was but a flashy, dirty-looking gin-shop, standing at a corner where
two streets met. Her colour rose though, higher than before, when a
pot-boy, with a shock of red hair, and his shirt-sleeves rolled up to
his shoulders, thus accosted her--

"You're just in time, miss; he'd 'a been off in a minit, but old
Batters, he come in just now, and your young man stopped to take his
share of another half-quartern."

CHAPTER IV

GENTLEMAN JIM

There is no reason, because a woman is coarse, hard-working, low-born,
and badly dressed, she should be without that inconvenient feminine
appendage--a heart. Dorothea trembled and turned pale when the door of
the Holborn gin-shop swung open and the man she most wished to see in
all the world stood at her side.

He would have been a good-looking fellow enough in any rank of life,
but to Dorothea, and others of her class, his clear, well-cut features
and jetty ringlets rendered him an absolute Adonis, despite the air of
half-drunken