what the
governor would have said!"

The thought shook him with silent laughter; a spectator might have
fancied he was sobbing.

But, after the lessons began, it might almost be said it was only when
a spectator was present that he was not sobbing. For Rosie, who was an
awkward, ungraceful young person, proved to be the dullest and most
butter-fingered pupil ever invented for the torture of teachers; at
least, so Lancelot thought, but then he had never had any other pupils,
and was not patient. It must be admitted, though, that Rosie giggled
perpetually, apparently finding endless humour in her own mistakes.
But the climax of the horror was the attendance of Mrs. Leadbatter at
the lessons, for, to Lancelot's consternation, she took it for granted
that her presence was part of the contract. She marched into the room
in her best cap, and sat, smiling, in the easy-chair, wheezing
complacently and beating time with her foot. Occasionally she would
supplement Lancelot's critical observations.

"It ain't as I fears to trust 'er with you, sir," she also remarked
about three times a week, "for I knows, sir, you're a gentleman. But
it's the neighbours; they never can mind their own business. I told
'em you was going to give my Rosie lessons, and you know, sir, that
they _will_ talk of what don't concern 'em. And, after all, sir, it's
an hour, and an hour is sixty minutes, ain't it, sir?"

And Lancelot, groaning inwardly, and unable to deny this chronometry,
felt that an ironic Providence was punishing him for his attentions to
Mary Ann.

And yet he only felt more tenderly towards Mary Ann. Contrasted with
these two vulgar females, whom he came to conceive as her oppressors,
sitting in gauds and finery, and taking lessons which had better
befitted their Cinderella--the figure of Mary Ann definitely reassumed
some of its antediluvian poetry, if we may apply the adjective to that
catastrophic washing of the steps. And Mary Ann herself had grown
gloomier--once or twice he thought she had been crying, though he was
too numbed and apathetic to ask, and was incapable of suspecting that
Rosie had anything to do with her tears. He hardly noticed that Rosie
had taken to feeding the canary; the question of how he should feed
himself was becoming every day more and more menacing. He saw
starvation slowly closing in upon him like the walls of a
torture-chamber. He had grown quite familiar with the pawnshop now,
though he s