CHAPTER XVIII.

AFTER FOUR YEARS.

Writing again--eternally writing! One would think it was Mrs. Jellyby.
Confound the scribbling, I say. "Do, for Heaven's sake, put it down,
Nellie, and let us have some dinner!"

Thus--impatiently, angrily--Mr. Laurence Thorndyke to the wife of his
bosom. It is five o'clock, of a brilliant summer afternoon, a stiflingly
close and oppressive afternoon, in the shabby street, in the shabby
tenement wherein Mr. and Mrs. Thorndyke dwell. The scene is a dingy
parlor--ingrain carpet, cane chairs, fly-blown wall paper, and a lady in
a soiled and torn wrapper discovered at a table rapidly writing. A child
of two years, a little boy, with Laurence Thorndyke's own blue eyes and
curling locks, toddles about the floor. In a basket cradle there is
coiled up a little white ball of a baby. The lady jogs this cradle with
her foot as she writes. A lady, young and handsome, though sadly faded,
her profusion of light hair all towsy and uncombed, her brows knit in
one straight frowning line. She pauses in her work for a second to
glance up--anything but a loving glance, by the by--and to answer:

"I don't know Mrs. Jellyby, Mr. Thorndyke. Did she write to keep herself
and her children from starving, I wonder, while her husband gambled and
drank their substance? As to dinner--couldn't you manage to get that
meal in the places you spend your days and nights? There is some bread
and butter on the kitchen table--some tea on the kitchen stove. Joanna
will give them to you if you like. You are not likely to find champagne
and ortolans in a tenement house."

And then, the pretty lips setting themselves in a tight, unpleasant
line, Mrs. Thorndyke goes back to her work.

She writes very rapidly, in a bold, firm hand, heedless of the child who
prattles and clings to her skirts. They are law papers she is copying,
in that clear, legible chirography.

For in three years it has come to this. Four tiny tenement rooms in a
shabby, crowded street, soiled and torn wrappers, bread and tea dinners,
one small grimy maid of all work, a drunkard and gambler instead of her
brilliant bridegroom, and law papers to copy all day and far into the
night, for the friend of her girlhood, Mr. Richard Gilbert, to "keep the
wolf from the door."

"D---- your catlap?" says Mr. Thorndyke, with a scowl of disgust. "I
say, Nellie, do stop that infernal scribble, scrabble, and send out for
oysters. I haven't eaten a mouthful to-da