entirely helpless, both of action
and of speech, and to her laughter was something between an anguish and
an ecstasy.

She was quite conscious of the stimulating effect upon Bindle of her
"Oh, Joe, don't!" yet never hesitated to utter what she knew would
eventually reduce her to a rippling and heaving mass of mirth.

She was Bindle's confidante, and seemed to find in the accounts of his
adventures compensation for the atmosphere of repression in which she
lived. In her heart she regretted that her husband had not been a
furniture-remover instead of a greengrocer; for it seemed to produce
endless diversions.

Little Millie would sit on a stool at her mother's feet drinking in
Uncle Joe's stories, uttering an occasional half-laughing,
half-reproachful, "Oh, Uncle Joe!"

If Mrs. Hearty had a weakness for Bindle's stories, Mrs. Bindle found
in Alfred Hearty her ideal of what a man should be. When a girl she
had been called upon to choose between Alfred Hearty, then a
greengrocer's assistant, and Joseph Bindle, and she never quite forgave
herself for having taken the wrong man.

In those days Bindle's winning tongue had left Alfred Hearty without
even a sporting chance. To Mrs. Bindle her mistaken choice was the
canker-worm in her heart, and it was not a little responsible for her
uncompromising attitude towards Bindle.

In a moment of pride at his conquest Bindle had said to Hearty:

"It's no good goin' after a woman wi' one eye on the golden gates of
'eaven, 'Earty, and that's why I won."

Since then Bindle had resented Hearty's apathetic courtship, which had
brought about his own victory. Many times Bindle had thought over the
folly of his wooing, and he always came to the same conclusion, a
muttered:

"If 'e 'ad 'ad a little more ginger 'e might 'ave won. They'd 'ave
made a tasty pair."

The result had been that Mrs. Bindle's sister, Martha, had caught Mr.
Hearty at the rebound, and had since regretted it as much as she ever
regretted anything.

"When you're my size," she would say, "you don' trouble much about
anything. It's the lean ones as worries. Look at Lizzie." Lizzie was
Mrs. Bindle.

Mrs. Bindle herself had been very different as a girl. Theatres and
music-halls were not then "places of sin"; and she was not altogether
above suspicion of being a flirt. When it dawned upon her that she had
made a mistake in marrying Bindle and letting her sister Martha secure
the matrimonial prize, a gr