r R. Wilfer stopped on
the steps, staring at it, and cried:

'Hal-loa?'

'Yes,' said Mrs Wilfer, 'the man came himself with a pair of pincers,
and took it off, and took it away. He said that as he had no expectation
of ever being paid for it, and as he had an order for another LADIES'
SCHOOL door-plate, it was better (burnished up) for the interests of all
parties.'

'Perhaps it was, my dear; what do you think?'

'You are master here, R. W.,' returned his wife. 'It is as you think;
not as I do. Perhaps it might have been better if the man had taken the
door too?'

'My dear, we couldn't have done without the door.'

'Couldn't we?'

'Why, my dear! Could we?'

'It is as you think, R. W.; not as I do.' With those submissive words,
the dutiful wife preceded him down a few stairs to a little basement
front room, half kitchen, half parlour, where a girl of about nineteen,
with an exceedingly pretty figure and face, but with an impatient and
petulant expression both in her face and in her shoulders (which in
her sex and at her age are very expressive of discontent), sat playing
draughts with a younger girl, who was the youngest of the House of
Wilfer. Not to encumber this page by telling off the Wilfers in detail
and casting them up in the gross, it is enough for the present that the
rest were what is called 'out in the world,' in various ways, and that
they were Many. So many, that when one of his dutiful children called in
to see him, R. Wilfer generally seemed to say to himself, after a little
mental arithmetic, 'Oh! here's another of 'em!' before adding aloud,
'How de do, John,' or Susan, as the case might be.

'Well Piggywiggies,' said R. W., 'how de do to-night? What I was
thinking of, my dear,' to Mrs Wilfer already seated in a corner with
folded gloves, 'was, that as we have let our first floor so well, and as
we have now no place in which you could teach pupils even if pupils--'

'The milkman said he knew of two young ladies of the highest
respectability who were in search of a suitable establishment, and he
took a card,' interposed Mrs Wilfer, with severe monotony, as if she
were reading an Act of Parliament aloud. 'Tell your father whether it
was last Monday, Bella.'

'But we never heard any more of it, ma,' said Bella, the elder girl.

'In addition to which, my dear,' her husband urged, 'if you have no
place to put two young persons into--'

'Pardon me,' Mrs Wilfer again interposed; 'they were not y