Teas, Jollyman's sugar--can't you _hear_
'em saying it, already? It's a fortune in itself, that name. Why, sir,
if a grocer called Boxon came at this moment, and offered to take me
into partnership on half profits, I wouldn't listen to him--there!"

Naturally, all this did not pass without many a pang in Warburton's
sensitive spots. He had set his face like brass, or tried to do so; but
in the night season he could all but have shed tears of humiliation, as
he tossed on his comfortless pillow. The day was spent in visits to
wholesale grocery establishments, in study of trade journals, in
calculating innumerable petty questions of profit and loss. When nausea
threatened him: when an all but horror of what lay before him assailed
his mind; he thought fixedly of The Haws, and made a picture to himself
of that peaceful little home devastated by his own fault. And to think
that all this sweat and misery arose from the need of gaining less than
a couple of hundred pounds a year! Life at The Haws, a life of
refinement and goodness and tranquillity such as can seldom be found,
demanded only that--a sum which the wealthy vulgar throw away upon the
foolish amusement of an hour. Warburton had a tumultuous mind in
reflecting on these things; but the disturbance was salutary, bearing
him through trials of nerve and patience and self-respect which he
could not otherwise have endured.

Warburton had now to find cheap lodgings for himself, unfurnished rooms
in some poor quarter not too far from the shop.

At length, in a new little street of very red brick, not far from
Fulham Palace Road at the Hammersmith end, he came upon a small house
which exhibited in its parlour window a card inscribed: "Two
unfurnished rooms to be let to single gentlemen only." The precision of
this notice made him hopeful, and a certain cleanliness of aspect in
the woman who opened to him was an added encouragement; but he found
negotiations not altogether easy. The landlady, a middle-aged widow,
seemed to regard him with some peculiar suspicion; before even
admitting him to the house, she questioned him closely as to his
business, his present place of abode, and so on, and Warburton was all
but turning away in impatience, when at last she drew aside, and
cautiously invited him to enter. Further acquaintance with Mrs. Wick
led him to understand that the cold, misgiving in her eye, the sour
rigidity of her lips, and her generally repellant manner, were
char