ter, not for the wearing
of jewelled rings, but for the accomplishment of that same dainty
needlework.

As she thought of all this, Tom's face came back to her memory. She
wished, oh, how she wished that she had looked round at him when her
friend had whispered that he was on the other side of the road!

What had he looked like? Why should her friend look upon his face and
she not see it?

"Oh, Tom! Tom!" she whispered to herself and a sudden hate towards
that jewelled ring sprang up in her.

When the afternoon came and she wheeled little Maud out in her mail
cart, she turned towards the shops. She felt as if to see that Windsor
arm-chair again would be next best to seeing Tom.

But the Windsor arm-chair was gone. Gone, like the dream of the happy
little home; gone, as Tom had gone, out of her life.

Its place was filled by an inexpensive plush-covered parlour suite,
suitable to the little villa where the wearer of that jewelled ring
should take up her abode, but Pattie turned from it petulantly.

"Cheap and nasty!" she said.

Now it so happened that on this afternoon, when Jane Adams came to
hang out the last of her washing, she found herself short of pegs. At
another time she would have managed with pins or hung the clothes in
bunches, but all day the craving for beer had been growing upon her,
and she determined to go out and buy pegs and have a drink.

Through force of circumstances she had not tasted a drop since
Saturday at dinner-time. Three whole days without a glass of beer!
There had been none at her father's home, of course. The old people
had been abstainers since she and Tom were babies, and she had not
cared to acknowledge to them that she "took a drop now and again." It
had been too late when she and Jim reached home last night to fetch
any, and she had hurried to her work this morning, and, indeed, had
not thought of getting a glass on her way, so full was her mind of
Pattie.

But now she meant to have a glass, and pegs she _must_ have!

So having told her lady--about the pegs--she put on her bonnet and
hurried out.

She soon found a grocer's and bought her pegs, and then she turned in
to the nearest public-house.

Not one glass, nor two, nor three, were sufficient to allay her
longing, and the housekeeping money went without a thought; it was
only the remembrance of the fleeting time which stayed her. She did
not wish her lady to wonder where she was.

When she pushed open the public-