en eight months in their service, and
proving myself useful in my situation, my salary would henceforth be
twelve shillings a week!

I could hardly believe my ears! Why, it was just half as much again as
what I had been receiving. On eight shillings a week I had lived
economically, but not so badly. And now, what might I not do with
twelve shillings a week?

Doubleday insisted on my coming up to his lodgings that evening to
celebrate the joyful event with a quiet supper. This invitation I
accepted, the first for nearly a month, and in view of the occasion
spent my first extra four shillings in anticipation on a coloured
Oxford-shirt, which I grandly requested, with the air of a moneyed man,
to be put down to my account. I found myself quite the hero of the
party that evening. Every one was there. I had an affecting
reconciliation with Whipcord, and forgot all about Flanagan's desertion
and Daly's indifference in my hour of tribulation; I discoursed
condescendingly with the Field-Marshal about his hopeless attachment,
and promised to go for a row up the river one Saturday with the twins.
And all the time of supper I was mentally calculating the cost of
Doubleday's entertainment, and wondering whether I could venture to give
a party myself!

In fact, I was so much taken up with my own good fortune and my new rise
in life, that I could think of nothing else. I forgot my former
warnings and humiliations. I forgot that even with twelve shillings a
week I had barely enough to clothe me respectably; I forgot that every
one of these fellows was in the habit of laughing at me behind my back,
and I forgot all my good resolutions to live steadily till Jack came
back.

And I forgot all about poor Jack--(now, so the letters had told me),
convalescent and slowly recovering health, but still lying lonely and
weary in the Packworth Hospital. Indeed, that evening his name only
twice crossed my mind--once when Doubleday and Crow were laughing over
the prospect of "Bull's-eye" turning up with a face deeply marked with
his late disease; and once when, walking back to Beadle Square, full of
my new plans of extravagance, I chanced to pass a small boy, curled up
on a doorstep, with his head resting on a shoeblack box, and the light
of a neighbouring lamp shining full on his sleeping face. Then I
remembered how, not very long ago, I had seen that same head lying side
by side with Jack's head on the pillow at Mrs Nash's. And as