spirit
soon gets tired. So, you see, he is sick-hearted, and will be more so
now that you have stood up to him; and, in this way or that, it's the
same with everyone, none of us gets what we want, while of what we
don't want there's always plenty."

While the old lady held forth thus in her little room which, although
she did not know it, had once been the penitential cell of the Abbey,
wherein for hundreds of years many unhappy ones had reflected in a very
similar vein, she was engaged in trying key after key upon a stout oak
chest. It was part of the ancient furniture of the place, that indeed
in former days had served as the receptacle for hair shirts, scourges
and other physical inducements to repentance and piety.

Now it had a different purpose and held Mrs. Parsons' best dresses,
also, in a bandbox, an ornament preserved from her wedding-cake, for
once in the far past she was married to a sailor, a very great
black-guard, who came to his end by tumbling from a gangway when he was
drunk. Among these articles was a tin tea-canister which, when opened,
proved to be full of money; gold, silver and even humble copper, to say
nothing of several banknotes.

"Now, there you are, my dear, take what you like," she said, "and pay
it back if you wish, but if you don't, it might have been worse spent."
And she pushed the receptacle, labelled "Imperial Pekoe," towards him
across the table, adding, "Drat those moths! There's another on my best
silk."

Godfrey burst out laughing and enjoyed that laugh, for it was his first
happy moment since his return to England.

"Give me what you like," he said.

So she extracted from the tea-tin a five-pound note, four sovereigns
and a pound's worth of silver and copper.

"There," she said, "that will do to begin with, for too much money in
the pocket is a temptation in a wicked place like London, where there's
always someone waiting to share it. If it's wanted there's more where
that came from, and you've only to write and say so. And now you have
got the address and you've got the cash, and if you want to catch that
last train it's time you were off. If I took the same to-morrow night,
why, it wouldn't surprise me, especially as I want to hear all you've
been a-doing in those foreign parts, tumbling over precipices and the
rest. So good-bye, my dear, and God bless you. Lord! it seems only the
other day that I was giving you your bottle."

Then they kissed each other and, having r