ment two or three sovereigns in his
pocket were the extent of his worldly wealth and his character was
utterly ruined. He regarded his fate as does a card-player who day
after day holds sixes and sevens when other men have the aces and
kings. Fate was against him. He saw no reason why he should not have
had the aces and kings continually, especially as fate had given him
perhaps more than his share of them at first. He had, however, lost
rubber after rubber,--not paying his stakes for some of the last
rubbers lost,--till the players would play with him no longer. The
misfortune might have happened to any man;--but it had happened to
him. There was no beginning again. A possible small allowance and
some very retired and solitary life, in which there would be no show
of honour, no flattery coming to him, was all that was left to him.

He let himself in at the house, and found his wife still awake. "I am
wet to the skin," he said. "I made up my mind to walk, and I would do
it;--but I am a fool for my pains." She made him some feeble answer,
affecting to be half asleep, and merely turned in her bed. "I must
be out early in the morning. Mind you make them dry my things. They
never do anything for my telling."

"You don't want them dried to-night?"

"Not to-night, of course;--but after I am gone to-morrow. They'll
leave them there without putting a hand to them, if you don't speak.
I must be off before breakfast to-morrow."

"Where are you going? Do you want anything packed?"

"No; nothing. I shall be back to dinner. But I must go down to
Birmingham, to see a friend of Happerton's on business. I will
breakfast at the station. As you said to-day, something must be done.
If it's to sweep a crossing, I must sweep it."

As she lay awake while he slept, she thought that those last words
were the best she had heard him speak since they were married. There
seemed to be some indication of a purpose in them. If he would
only sweep a crossing as a man should sweep it, she would stand
by him, and at any rate do her duty to him, in spite of all that
had happened. Alas! she was not old enough to have learned that a
dishonest man cannot begin even to sweep a crossing honestly till he
have in very truth repented of his former dishonesty. The lazy man
may become lazy no longer, but there must have been first a process
through his mind whereby laziness has become odious to him. And that
process can hardly be the immediate result of mis