thering?'

From long experience Betty caught the issue.

'The chap I get paints from. I--I told him he'd got to wait; he c-cut up
rough; said he'd waited long enough.'

The stutter, becoming pronounced, showed Tommy a little stirred.

'Well----' Betty's tone was depressed. There was an intonation of
melancholy, however, in general in the Crevequers' stammering speech--a
melancholy that was on the borderland of laughter, and stuttered into it
as a man stumbles unawares into puddles, walking along a wet path. Miss
Crevequer, quite suddenly, stumbled into one now, for no apparent
reason, and dragged Tommy after her. 'Well'--Betty regained, as it were,
dry ground--'let's give him this week's rent; and by next week something
will have turned up. You can win some at cards, can't you? It's a pity
I've got no job just now. At least, it's rather fun really, and we'll go
to the theatre to-night.'

Tommy nodded. The proposition seemed a matter of course; no incongruity
struck either. There was, in fact, no incongruity; it was very simple:
the payment of debts would have been an indulgence quite beyond their
means; going to the theatre was one within them. The Crevequers could
only afford cheap pleasures.

They settled themselves for the afternoon under an awning outside a cafe
by which royalty, it was supposed, would eventually pass. There they
conversed with friends, and Tommy drew pictures, and time, as usual,
passed agreeably and sociably. At about six o'clock there came by an
informant, who remarked that royalty had gone for a drive in the
opposite direction. Tommy started in pursuit, and did not join Betty
again till it was too late for the theatre. So they asked some friends
and had a supper-party at a restaurant instead, because the theatre
money must be somehow spent. Its spending, and a good deal more besides,
proved beautifully easy. Then they came home through the lit streets;
the flare of them and the noise of them and the gay people who lounged
and talked in them always made the Crevequers feel cheerily at home, and
flowing over with the milk of human kindness.

Beyond the flaring, screaming world there was a soft summer moon, nearly
at the full, and spaces of silver light on the land and the dark, still
sea. But these children of the gay streets had no concern with the moon;
the lamps were for them, and the flare of lights that lit the coster's
barrow and the pedlar's awning. They loafed along with the true
v