a coin. It was a four-shilling
piece.

"No. Get away."

"I'll give you change."

"Oh! take it," he yielded, "and begone with ye, and ring for something
to drink."

"You are a duck, pa!" she said, kissing him. The other two men smiled.

"Let's have a tune now, Ella," said Peake, after she had rung the bell.
The girl dutifully sat down to the piano and sang "The Children's Home."
It was a song which always touched her father's heart.

Peake was in one of those moods at once gay and serene which are
possible only to successful middle-aged men who have consistently worked
hard without permitting the faculty for pleasure to deteriorate through
disuse. He was devoted to his colliery, and his commercial acuteness
was scarcely surpassed in the Five Towns, but he had always found time
to amuse himself; and at fifty-two, with a clear eye and a perfect
digestion, his appreciation of good food, good wine, a good cigar, a
fine horse, and a pretty woman was unimpaired. On this night his
happiness was special; he had returned in the afternoon from a week's
visit to London, and he was glad to get back again. He loved his wife
and adored his daughter, in his own way, and he enjoyed the feminized
domestic atmosphere of his fine new house with exactly the same zest as,
on another evening, he might have enjoyed the blue haze of the
billiard-room at the Conservative Club. The interior of the drawing-room
realized very well Peake's ideals. It was large, with two magnificent
windows, practicably comfortable, and unpretentious. Peake despised, or
rather he ignored, the aesthetic crazes which had run through
fashionable Hillport like an infectious fever, ruthlessly decimating its
turned and twisted mahogany and its floriferous carpets and wall-papers.
That the soft thick pile under his feet would wear for twenty years, and
that the Welsbach incandescent mantles on the chandelier saved thirty
per cent, in gas-bills while increasing the light by fifty per cent.: it
was these and similar facts which were uppermost in his mind as he gazed
round that room, in which every object spoke of solid, unassuming luxury
and represented the best value to be obtained for money spent. He
desired, of a Saturday night, nothing better than such a room, a couple
of packs of cards, and the presence of wife and child and his two
life-long friends, Sneyd and Lovatt--safe men both. After cards were
over--and on Lovatt's account play ceased at ten o'clock--they w