Aubreys, and Montmorencis, and
Maudes, and Blanches. Still even Druse's untrained eye lingered with
pleasure on the name, as she came in one morning, after having tasted
the delights of life in the Vere de Vere for a couple of weeks. She felt
that she now lived a very idle life. She had coaxed the three children
into a regular attendance at school, and her uncle was always away until
night. She could not find enough work to occupy her, though, true to her
training, when there was nothing else to do she scrubbed everything
wooden and scoured everything tin. Still there were long hours when it
was tiresome to sit listening to the tramping overhead, or the quarrels
below, watching the slow hands of the clock; and Druse was afraid in the
streets yet, though she did not dare say so, because her bold, pert
little cousins laughed at her. She was indeed terribly lonely. Her uncle
was a man of few words; he ate his supper, and went to sleep after his
pipe and the foaming pitcher of beer that had frightened Druse when she
first came. For Druse had been a "Daughter of Temperance" in East Green.
She had never seen any one drink beer before. She thought of the poem
that the minister's daughter (in pale blue muslin, tucked to the waist)
had recited at the Temperance Lodge meeting. It began:

"Pause, haughty man, whose lips are at the brim
Of Hell's own draught, in yonder goblet rare--"

She wished she had courage to repeat it. She felt if Uncle John could
have heard Lucinda recite it--. Yet he might not think it meant him; he
was not haughty, although he was a carpenter, and the beer he drank out
of one of the children's mugs. But it troubled Druse. She thought of it
as she sat one afternoon, gravely crotcheting a tidy after an East Green
pattern, before it was time for the children to be back from school. It
was a warm day in October, so warm that she had opened the window,
letting in with the air the effluvia from the filthy street, and the
discordant noises. The lady in the flat above was whipping a refractory
child, whose cries came distinctly through the poor floors and
partitions of the Vere De Vere.

Suddenly there was a loud, clumsy knock at the door. She opened it, and
a small boy with a great basket of frilled and ruffled clothes, peeping
from under the cover, confronted her.

"Say, lady," he asked, red and cross, "Is yer name De Courcy?"

"No, it ain't," replied Druse. "She's the back flat to the right, here.
I'l