stopped; for the first time there came a choking in her throat, and a sob, quickly repressed.

Mr. Standish pretended absorption in his occupation, spread out the tattered print, and announced his intention of bestowing to the painting a new lease of life by pasting it upon a pasteboard back. He gathered the necessary implements for the task. Meg, usually so active, watched in silence; but he knew, by the trembling of the little hand resting on the table, by the stiff uprightness of the small figure beside him, the fierce battle the child was waging with herself to suppress all show of emotion.

He took no apparent heed of her, but proceeded with the task of renovation. Perhaps he had intended still to lead the child's mind to a truer conception of a lady than she could get from worship of this simpering fetish, with a mouth like a cherry, and curled eyelashes; but as he handled the old fashion-plate, the pathos of its smeared and battered condition touched him with a sense of sacredness, and he found himself declaring that her mother might have been like that picture. There was no doubt about it; it represented a lovely creature, and her mother was a lovely lady.

When the task was completed he was rewarded by the sight of Meg's radiant countenance. In perfect peace she carried off the restored picture.

CHAPTER II.

TWO YEARS LATER.

Two years had elapsed, and to superficial observers Meg might have appeared to have changed only by some inches added to her length of limb. She still haunted the corner overlooking the stairs on the topmost lobby, but it was not to watch the come and go of the shabby social eddies breaking down below. She read much to herself. Her choice of literature was a queer mélange of odds and ends. She was up to all the fires, the accidents, the pageants of a world into which she had never set foot. She knew to what corner of a London daily paper and provincial weekly she was to look to find descriptions of these sensational incidents, and the style in which they were recorded stirred in her an admiration worthy of being lavished on Homeric epics. She knew also a number of ballads by heart that she would recite with an amount of native dramatic vividness.

If the shifting scenes going on downstairs no longer attracted her as in the past, she was intent and absorbed in watching one life. The friendship between her and Mr. Standish had become a tie that drew out peculiarities of the child's nature. There had been quarrels, coolnesses, reconciliations, but Meg's usual attitude toward the journalist was one of mingled proprietorship and watchfulness. It was a mixture of motherly solicitude and dog-like faithfulness. She cross-questioned, admonished, and kept vigilant guard over his interests.

Once, having discovered that Mrs. Browne had cheated him of sixpence in the weekly bill, she drew the landlady's notice to the overcharge; but Mrs. Browne refused to acknowledge or set it right, and Meg cried herself to sleep. Loyalty to the landlady was discarded, and with brimming eyes and quivering lips she told Mr. Standish next day of that fraudulent sixpence. To her dismay he laughed, and vowed that Mrs. Browne's name ought to be handed down to posterity as an honest landlady if sixpence covered the amount of a week's cheating. Meg would not be comforted; to her the landlady seemed remorseless.

A mother could not have detected with quicker apprehension a shade of weariness or pallor on the young man's face. Her invariable question on such an occasion would be, "What have you had for dinner?" Sometimes he tried to deceive her. He would roll out a dazzling menu—turtle soup, turbot, plum-pudding.

She would stop him at once with pathetic and angry remonstrance. "It is not true; you know it is not true. Why do you say it?"

Her earnestness always moved him; he was ashamed of deceiving her.

Their last quarrel had been caused by Mr. Standish's confession that he had dined off fish.

"Fish!" cried Meg with scorn, tossing her head. "Can you work after a bit of fish? What fish—turbot, salmon, fried soles?" The ladies who occupied the drawing-room floor gave occasional dinner-parties, where such delicacies figured.

As Mr. Standish kept shaking his head, the smile in his eyes growing more amused and tender, a terrible idea dawned upon Meg. She grew pale.

"Herring!" she faltered.

"Herrings," he repeated in a voice of rich appreciation. "Two herrings, fat as lord mayors!"

Meg walked about the room, her eyes bright with angry misery, her lips trembling. "It's downright wicked! You want to kill yourself, that's what you want to do." She flicked a tear away. "A workman in the street down there has a better dinner than that."

"Now, Meg, be reasonable," the young man pleaded in a voice of protest. "Don't you see," he went on, striking his left palm with two fingers of the right hand, "there is a day called 'pay-day' that rules my bill of fare, as I explained to you the other day the moon rules the tides. On pay-day and its immediate followers I live in abundance. Then come days of lesser luxuries, then abstinence. I have reached this period. Soon plenty will reign again."

"It is a foolish way of managing money," said Meg, abrupt in her trouble, and only half-comforted.

"Can you tell me, Meg, how to manage money without reference to pay-day?" he asked.

"Will you do as I tell you?" she said, stopping short in her restless peregrinations.

He nodded.

"Take your money, all your money, and divide it into little parcels, as many parcels as there are days it must last, and every day spend just what is inside one of the little parcels, and not a bit more," said Meg with elucidating gestures.

Mr. Standish vowed she spoke like a chancellor of the exchequer; that the more he heard her the more he was determined on coming into the colossal fortune he was to enjoy some day, to appoint her his almoner, housekeeper, the dispenser of his bounties, the orderer of his dinners. This project to be his housekeeper was one dear to Meg's heart, the pacifier of her wrath. By what means Mr. Standish was to come into possession of this fabulous wealth remained vague. Sometimes he would announce his intention of getting it by marrying an heiress, a project always chillingly received by Meg. Sometimes she would suggest spitefully that the heiress would not marry him; but Mr. Standish overrode all objections, and would depict days of indolent delight for himself and his bride, while Meg managed the household. When the daydream reached this point it generally abruptly terminated by Meg plunging out of the room, and banging the door after her with an emphatic "Shan't!"

On the evening of the fish dinner Mr. Standish left the heiress out of the question, and Meg was softened.

The next day the young man supped at home. His tray, as usual on these occasions, was brought in by Meg. A burly German sausage and a pot of Scotch marmalade graced the board. Meg's answers were evasive concerning the source from which these dainties came. It struck Mr. Standish that Meg had bought them with the store of half-pence he had taught her to put away in a moneybox he had himself presented to her, with a view to inculcating economical instincts. Her fierce refusal to answer convinced him that he had guessed right.

The refusal to touch these dainties died on his lips. He could not hurt the child. He ate the supper she had provided with loud laudations of its excellence. Before it was finished an arrangement had been entered