oal in their pockets. But this
conduct--resembling what is fabled of the natives of the Scilly Islands,
that they "eke out a precarious livelihood by taking in each other's
washing"--led to strife and bickering; so that the Stoker for the week
(as the girl appointed to collect these supplies was called) had to
infringe a little on the secret household stores of Miss Marlett. This
week, as it happened, Margaret Shields was the Stoker, and she so bore
herself in her high office as to extort the admiration of the very
housemaids.

"Even the ranks of Tusculum
Could scarce forbear to cheer,"

if we may again quote the author who was at that time Miss Shields'
favorite poet. Miss Shields had not studied Mr. Matthew Arnold, and was
mercifully unaware that not to detect the "pinchbeck" in the _Lays_ is
the sign of a grovelling nature.

Before she was sent to Miss Marlett's, four years ere this date,
Margaret Shields' instruction had been limited. "The best thing that
could be said for it," as the old sporting prophet remarked of his
own education, "was that it had been mainly eleemosynary." The Chelsea
School Board fees could but rarely be extracted from old Dicky Shields.
But Robert Maitland, when still young in philanthropy, had seen the
clever, merry, brown-eyed child at some school treat, or inspection, or
other function; had covenanted in some sort with her shiftless parent;
had rescued the child from the streets, and sent her as a pupil to
Miss Marlett's. Like Mr. Day, the accomplished author of "Sandford and
Merton," and creator of the immortal Mr. Barlow, Robert Maitland had
conceived the hope that he might have a girl educated up to his own
intellectual standard, and made, or "ready-made," a helpmate meet for
him. He was, in a more or less formal way, the guardian of Margaret
Shields, and the ward might be expected (by anyone who did not know
human nature any better) to blossom into the wife.

Maitland could "please himself," as people say; that is, in his choice
of a partner he had no relations to please--no one but the elect young
lady, who, after all, might not be "pleased" with alacrity.

Whether pleased or not, there could be no doubt that Margaret Shields
was extremely pleasing. Beside her two shivering chamber-mates
("chamber-dekyns" they would have been called, in Oxford slang, four
hundred years ago), Miss Shields looked quite brilliant, warm, and
comfortable, even in the eager and the nipping