f
a sovereign down in front of him. "That's a little present from your
auntie on your leaving school."

"Oh, auntie!" he cried feebly.

"Oh!" cried Clara, genuinely startled.

Mrs Hamps was sometimes thus astoundingly munificent. It was she who
had given the schooner to Edwin. And her presents of elaborately
enveloped and costly toilet soap on the birthdays of the children, and
at Christmas, were massive. Yet Clara always maintained that she was
the meanest old thing imaginable. And Maggie had once said that she
knew that Auntie Clara made her servant eat dripping instead of butter.
To give inferior food to a servant was to Maggie the unforgivable in
parsimony.

"Well," Mr Clayhanger warningly inquired, "what do you say to your
aunt?"

"Thank you, auntie," Edwin sheepishly responded, fingering the coin.

It was a princely sum. And she had stuck up for him famously in the
matter of the report. Strange that his father should not have read the
report with sufficient attention to remark the fall to third place!
Anyway, that aspect of the affair was now safely over, and it seemed to
him that he had not lost much prestige by it. He would still be able to
argue with his father on terms not too unequal, he hoped.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FIVE.

As the tea drew to an end, and the plates of toast, bread and butter,
and tea-cake grew emptier, and the slop-basin filled, and only Maggie's
flowers remained fresh and immaculate amid the untidy debris of the
meal; and as Edwin and Clara became gradually indifferent to jam, and
then inimical to it; and as the sounds of the street took on the softer
quality of summer evening, and the first filmy shades of twilight
gathered imperceptibly in the corners of the room, and Mr Clayhanger
performed the eructations which signified that he had had enough; so
Mrs Hamps prepared herself for one of her classic outbursts of feeling.

"Well!" she said at last, putting her spoon to the left of her cup as a
final indication that seriously she would drink no more. And she gave a
great sigh. "School over! And the only son going out into the world!
How time flies!" And she gave another great sigh, implying an immense
melancholy due to this vision of the reality of things. Then she
remembered her courage, and the device of leaning hard, and all her
philosophy.

"But it's all for the best!" she broke forth in a new brave tone.
"Eve