w panes, the tiny pretence of a
fire in the grate. It was not exactly a dirty room, but it lacked all
brightness and freshness. The chimney did not draw well, and now and
then a great gust of smoke would come down, causing the busy writer to
start and rub her smarting eyes. She was a young woman, as young as
Charlotte Harman, with a slight figure and very pale face. There were
possibilities of beauty in the face. But the possibilities had come to
nothing; the features were too pinched, too underfed, the eyes, in
themselves dark and heavily fringed, too often dimmed by tears. It was a
very cold day, and sleet was beginning to fall, and the smoking chimney
had a vindictive way of smoking more than ever, but the young woman
wrote on rapidly, as though for bare life. Each page as she finished it,
was flung on one side; some few fell on the floor, but she did not stop
even to pick them up.

The short winter daylight had quite faded, and she had stood up to light
the gas, when the room door was pushed slightly ajar, and one of those
little maids-of-all-work, so commonly seen in London, put in her untidy
head.

"Ef you please, 'em, Harold's been and hurt Daisy, and they is
quarreling h'ever so, and I think as baby's a deal worse, 'em."

"I will go up to them, Anne, and you may stay down and lay the cloth for
tea--I expect your master in early to-night."

She put her writing materials hastily away, and with a light, quick step
ran upstairs. She entered a room which in its size and general
shabbiness might better have been called an attic, and found herself in
the presence of three small children. The two elder ran to meet her with
outstretched arms and glad cries. The baby sat up in his cot and gazed
hard at his mother with flushed cheeks and round eyes.

She took the baby in her arms and sat down in a low rocking-chair close
to the fire. Harold and Daisy went on their little knees in front of
her. Now that mother had come their quarrel was quite over, and the poor
baby ceased to fret.

Seated thus, with her little children about her there was no doubt at
all that Charlotte Home had a pleasant face; the care vanished from her
eyes as she looked into the innocent eyes of her babies, and as she
nursed the seven-months-old infant she began crooning a sweet old song
in a true, delicious voice, to which the other two listened with
delight:----

"In the days when we went gipsying,
A long time ago."

"What's gipsying, m