f the family,
and such behaviour cannot always be made up for. As to the offer, she
had declined it in perfect good faith. Yes, she preferred her liberty,
her innocent nights at the Canterbury Music Hall, her scampering about
the streets at all hours, her marmalade and pickles eaten off a table
covered with a newspaper in company with half a dozen friends as
harum-scarum as herself. Deliberately, she preferred these joys to
anything she could imagine as entering into the life of a 'lady.'

However, it was a fact that Christmas was very near, also a fact that
she stood pledged to marry Luke Ackroyd any day after Christmas that he
chose to claim her. She was a little sorry that she could not inform
her uncle in Tottenham Court Road of the change she was about to make
in her life; there was no knowing how he might have behaved on such an
occasion. Luke had been saving a little money of late, but it was
naturally a very little; he, foolish fellow, had a way of buying her
things which she did not in the least want, but which she could not
refuse since it gave him such enormous pleasure to offer them. Luke was
very generous, whatever his faults might be. Certain presents of his
she had returned to him, in wrath, probably once a fortnight, and when,
in the course of things, she had to take them back again, some object
was always added. The presents cost little, it is true; Totty did not
ask the price of them, but liked the kindness which suggested their
purchase. She liked many things about Luke Ackroyd; whether she really
liked him himself, liked him in 'the proper way'--well, that was a
question she asked herself often enough without any very definite
answer.

No matter, she had promised to marry him, and she was not the girl to
break her word. Now, if her uncle had still been in communication with
her, was it not a very likely thing that he would have felt a desire
to--in fact, to do something for them? It was not nice to begin married
life in furnished lodgings, especially if prudence dictated the living
in a single room, as such numbers of her acquaintances did. Totty had
discovered that couples who wedded and went to live in one furnished
room seldom got along well together. It was well if the wife did not
shortly go about with ugly-looking bruises on her face, or with her arm
in a sling. No, to be sure, Luke Ackroyd was not a man of that kind; it
was inconceivable that he should ever be harsh to her, let alone
brutal.