trusted.

'Well, it's if _you_ can manage, mum,' she replied. 'I don't see as I
could have any fault to find, if you thought you could both live in
that little room. And as for the rent, _I_ should be quite satisfied if
we said seven shillings instead of five and six.'

'Thank you, Mrs. Conisbee; thank you very much indeed. I will write to
my sister at once; the news will be a great relief to her. We shall
have quite an enjoyable little holiday together.'

A week later the eldest of the three Miss Maddens arrived. As it was
quite impossible to find space for her boxes in the bedroom, Mrs.
Conisbee allowed them to be deposited in the room occupied by her
daughter, which was on the same floor. In a day or two the sisters had
begun a life of orderly tenor. When weather permitted they were out
either in the morning or afternoon. Alice Madden was in London for the
first time; she desired to see the sights, but suffered the
restrictions of poverty and ill-health. After nightfall, neither she
nor Virginia ever left home.

There was not much personal likeness between them.

The elder (now five-and-thirty) tended to corpulence, the result of
sedentary life; she had round shoulders and very short legs. Her face
would not have been disagreeable but for its spoilt complexion; the
homely features, if health had but rounded and coloured them, would
have expressed pleasantly enough the gentleness and sincerity of her
character. Her cheeks were loose, puffy, and permanently of the hue
which is produced by cold; her forehead generally had a few pimples;
her shapeless chin lost itself in two or three fleshy fissures.
Scarcely less shy than in girlhood, she walked with a quick, ungainly
movement as if seeking to escape from some one, her head bent forward.

Virginia (about thirty-three) had also an unhealthy look, but the
poverty, or vitiation, of her blood manifested itself in less unsightly
forms. One saw that she had been comely, and from certain points of
view her countenance still had a grace, a sweetness, all the more
noticeable because of its threatened extinction. For she was rapidly
ageing; her lax lips grew laxer, with emphasis of a characteristic one
would rather not have perceived there; her eyes sank into deeper
hollows; wrinkles extended their network; the flesh of her neck wore
away. Her tall meagre body did not seem strong enough to hold itself
upright.

Alice had brown hair, but very little of it. Virginia's was i