penses, and she contrived to make these sums
answer well enough. But one day, determined to know the worst, she
asked him, at the risk of another explosion, how their account stood at
the bank? He replied in the best of his humours, apparently, "that the
five thousand they had had there had been overdrawn some six weeks, and
that, if it hadn't been for his exertions in various ways, she'd have
been starved out before now."

"All gone!" she said; "and where to?"

"To the devil," he answered. "And you may go after it."

"And what are we to do now, George?"

"The best we can."

"But the baby, George? I shall lie-in in three months."

"You must take your chance, and the baby too. As long as there's any
money going you'll get some of it. If you wrote to your father you
might get some."

"I'll never do that," she said.

"Won't you?" said he; "I'll starve you into it when money gets scarce."

Things remained like this till it came to be nearly ten months from
their marriage. Mary had never written home but once, from Brighton,
and then, as we know, the answer had miscarried; so she, conceiving she
was cast off by her father, had never attempted to communicate with him
again. The time grew nigh that she should be confined, and she got very
sick and ill, and still the man Maitland lived in the house, and he and
George spent much of their time at night, away together.

Yet poor Mary had a friend who stayed by her through it all--Captain
Saxon, the great billiard sharper. Many a weary hour, when she was
watching up anxious and ill for her husband, this man would come and
sit with her, talking agreeably and well about many things; but chiefly
about the life he used to lead before he fell so low as he was then.

He used to say, "Mrs. Hawker, you cannot tell what a relief and
pleasure it is to me to have a LADY to talk to again. You must conceive
how a man brought up like myself misses it."

"Surely, Captain Saxon," she would say, "you have some relations left.
Why not go back to them?"

"They wouldn't own me," he said. "I smashed everything, a fine fortune
amongst other things, by my goings on; and they very properly cast me
off. I never got beyond the law, though. Many well-known men speak to
me now, but they won't play with me, though; I am too good. And so you
see I play dark to win from young fellows, and I am mixed up with a lot
of scoundrels. A man brought an action against me the other day to
recover two hundr