is key, and stole softly upstairs. The one little
room he possessed met him cruelly, look round it where he might, with
silent memorials of Miss Gwilt. On the chimney-piece were the flowers
she had given him at various times, all withered long since, and all
preserved on a little china pedestal, protected by a glass shade. On the
wall hung a wretched colored print of a woman, which he had caused to be
nicely framed and glazed, because there was a look in it that reminded
him of her face. In his clumsy old mahogany writing-desk were the few
letters, brief and peremptory, which she had written to him at the time
when he was watching and listening meanly at Thorpe Ambrose to please
_her_. And when, turning his back on these, he sat down wearily on his
sofa-bedstead--there, hanging over one end of it, was the gaudy cravat
of blue satin, which he had bought because she had told him she liked
bright colors, and which he had never yet had the courage to wear,
though he had taken it out morning after morning with the resolution to
put it on! Habitually quiet in his actions, habitually restrained in
his language, he now seized the cravat as if it was a living thing that
could feel, and flung it to the other end of the room with an oath.

The time passed; and still, though his resolution to stand between Miss
Gwilt and her marriage remained unbroken, he was as far as ever from
discovering the means which might lead him to his end. The more he
thought and thought of it, the darker and the darker his course in the
future looked to him.

He rose again, as wearily as he had sat down, and went to his cupboard.
"I'm feverish and thirsty," he said; "a cup of tea may help me." He
opened his canister, and measured out his small allowance of tea, less
carefully than usual. "Even my own hands won't serve me to-day!" he
thought, as he scraped together the few grains of tea that he had
spilled, and put them carefully back in the canister.

In that fine summer weather, the one fire in the house was the kitchen
fire. He went downstairs for the boiling water, with his teapot in his
hand.

Nobody but the landlady was in the kitchen. She was one of the many
English matrons whose path through this world is a path of thorns; and
who take a dismal pleasure, whenever the opportunity is afforded them,
in inspecting the scratched and bleeding feet of other people in a like
condition with themselves. Her one vice was of the lighter sort--the
vice of