a, they'll cheat you so," her sister wailed.

Ann Eliza brushed aside the imputation with a smile, and a few minutes
later, having set the room to rights, and cast a last glance at the
shop, she was tying on her bonnet with fumbling haste.

The morning was damp and cold, with a sky full of sulky clouds that
would not make room for the sun, but as yet dropped only an occasional
snow-flake. In the early light the street looked its meanest and most
neglected; but to Ann Eliza, never greatly troubled by any untidiness
for which she was not responsible, it seemed to wear a singularly
friendly aspect.

A few minutes' walk brought her to the market where Evelina made her
purchases, and where, if he had any sense of topographical fitness, Mr.
Ramy must also deal.

Ann Eliza, making her way through the outskirts of potato-barrels and
flabby fish, found no one in the shop but the gory-aproned butcher who
stood in the background cutting chops.

As she approached him across the tesselation of fish-scales, blood and
saw-dust, he laid aside his cleaver and not unsympathetically asked:
"Sister sick?"

"Oh, not very--jest a cold," she answered, as guiltily as if Evelina's
illness had been feigned. "We want a steak as usual, please--and my
sister said you was to be sure to give me jest as good a cut as if it
was her," she added with child-like candour.

"Oh, that's all right." The butcher picked up his weapon with a grin.
"Your sister knows a cut as well as any of us," he remarked.

In another moment, Ann Eliza reflected, the steak would be cut and
wrapped up, and no choice left her but to turn her disappointed steps
toward home. She was too shy to try to delay the butcher by such
conversational arts as she possessed, but the approach of a deaf old
lady in an antiquated bonnet and mantle gave her her opportunity.

"Wait on her first, please," Ann Eliza whispered. "I ain't in any
hurry."

The butcher advanced to his new customer, and Ann Eliza, palpitating in
the back of the shop, saw that the old lady's hesitations between liver
and pork chops were likely to be indefinitely prolonged. They were still
unresolved when she was interrupted by the entrance of a blowsy
Irish girl with a basket on her arm. The newcomer caused a momentary
diversion, and when she had departed the old lady, who was evidently as
intolerant of interruption as a professional story-teller, insisted on
returning to the beginning of her complicated order, a