ord likes us to pray, but He'll take his own time--an'
she's got troubles enough of her own, Nurse. D'yer see as she's leff off
her ring?"

Marcella looked at Emily's left hand, while the girl flushed all over,
and ironed with a more fiery energy than before.

"I've 'eerd such things of 'im, Nurse, this last two days," she said
with low vehemence--"as I'm _never_ goin' to wear it again. It 'ud burn
me!"

Emily was past twenty. Some eighteen months before this date she had
married a young painter. After nearly a year of incredible misery her
baby was born. It died, and she very nearly died also, owing to the
brutal ill-treatment of her husband. As soon as she could get on her
feet again, she tottered home to her widowed mother, broken for the time
in mind and body, and filled with loathing of her tyrant. He made no
effort to recover her, and her family set to work to mend if they could
what he had done. The younger sister of fourteen was earning seven
shillings a week at paper-bag making; the brother, a lad of eighteen,
had been apprenticed by his mother, at the cost of heroic efforts some
six years before, to the leather-currying trade, in a highly skilled
branch of it, and was now taking sixteen shillings a week with the
prospect of far better things in the future. He at once put aside from
his earnings enough to teach Emily "the shirt-ironing," denying himself
every indulgence till her training was over.

Then they had their reward. Emily's colour and spirits came back; her
earnings made all the difference to the family between penury and ease;
while she and her little sister kept the three tiny rooms in which they
lived, and waited on their invalid mother, with exquisite cleanliness
and care.

Marcella stood by the ironing-table a moment after the girl's speech.

"Poor Emily!" she said softly, laying her hand on the ringless one that
held down the shirt on the board.

Emily looked up at her in silence. But the girl's eyes glowed with
things unsaid and inexpressible--the "eternal passion, eternal pain,"
which in half the human race have no voice.

"He was a very rough man was Em'ly's husband," said Mrs. Jervis, in her
delicate thoughtful voice--"a very uncultivated man."

Marcella turned round to her, startled and amused by the adjective. But
the other two listeners took it quite quietly. It seemed to them
apparently to express what had to be said.

"It's a sad thing is want of edication," Mrs. Jervis went