ed. "What'll yer 'ave, sir?"

With an eagerness which was mingled with shame, Bunting drew a penny
out of his pocket and took a paper--it was the Evening Standard--
from the boy's hand.

Then, very slowly, he shut the gate and walked back through the raw,
cold air, up the flagged path, shivering yet full of eager, joyful
anticipation.

Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly he would pass
a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent,
miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments
of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife,
with careworn, troubled Ellen.

A hot wave of unease, almost of remorse, swept over Bunting. Ellen
would never have spent that penny on herself--he knew that well
enough--and if it hadn't been so cold, so foggy, so--so drizzly,
he would have gone out again through the gate and stood under the
street lamp to take his pleasure. He dreaded with a nervous dread
the glance of Ellen's cold, reproving light-blue eye. That glance
would tell him that he had had no business to waste a penny on a
paper, and that well he knew it!

Suddenly the door in front of him opened, and he beard a familiar
voice saying crossly, yet anxiously, "What on earth are you doing
out there, Bunting? Come in--do! You'll catch your death of cold!
I don't want to have you ill on my hands as well as everything else!"
Mrs. Bunting rarely uttered so many words at once nowadays.

He walked in through the front door of his cheerless house. "I
went out to get a paper," he said sullenly.

After all, he was master. He had as much right to spend the money
as she had; for the matter of that the money on which they were now
both living had been lent, nay, pressed on him--not on Ellen--by
that decent young chap, Joe Chandler. And he, Bunting, had done
all he could; he had pawned everything he could pawn, while Ellen,
so he resentfully noticed, still wore her wedding ring.

He stepped past her heavily, and though she said nothing, he knew
she grudged him his coming joy. Then, full of rage with her and
contempt for himself, and giving himself the luxury of a mild, a
very mild, oath--Ellen had very early made it clear she would
have no swearing in her presence--he lit the hall gas full-flare.

"How can we hope to get lodgers if they can't even see the card?"
he shouted angrily.

And there was truth in what he said, for now that he had lit the
gas, the oblong ca