that, their day's work being done, they
encountered as they left the scene of their respective duties, and,
their homes lying within a few doors of each other, walked there
together.

He was a tall man, loosely put together, with iron-grey hair, stooping
shoulders, and a look on his long-featured face at once dreary and
gentle. She was small and dark, alert and pretty, and, from the crown
of her neatly-dressed head, in its plain straw hat, to the soles of her
sensibly shod feet, wholesome-looking.

The day that was soon to melt into evening had been sultry, the
class-rooms airless, their tasks fatiguing. The pavement beneath their
feet was hot; both were glad to breathe what tiny breeze was astir;
both were tired. They walked side by side in that best of all
companionships which demands no effort at sprightliness, nor the
utterance of one word not spontaneously spoken.

"Shall we see you down by the river to-night?" she asked him, at
length.

If he could get away he would go there, he said.

"Do come!" she gently urged him. "It does you good to get away."

Then the man's house was reached. It was one in a street of L30-a-year
houses, with large bow-windows, small gardens, red-and-white striped
curtains to protect green-painted front doors. He made a motion of his
hand, half-heartedly inviting her to enter.

She shook her head.

"I've been in once to-day," she said. "Mrs Kilbourne asked me to get
her something in the town, and I took it in."

"So long as you remember the caution I gave you----"

"You may be quite sure I remember."

As she would have passed on he stopped her.

"One minute," he said. "The rose I told you of is out, to-day."

The tiny garden was fashioned into a square of grass-plot, a bed full
of rose-trees in its midst. The Frau Karl Druschki, recently acquired,
had only one half-unfolded bloom. He gathered it and gave to her as she
stood beyond the iron rails.

"Only one! How could you pull it for me!" she reproached him.

"Absolutely pure white--quite flawless, you see," he said.

His touch lingered on the flower, for he loved roses; then he put it
into her hand, and she went on her way.

In the bow-windowed front room of Horace Kilbourne's house his wife was
lying on the sofa--semi-paralysed, a drunkard.

"That you, Horry dear?" she said, as, with a gloomy, hopeless face he
looked in upon the unlovely sight.

She raised a frowsy head from its pillow, put a dirty hand to her eyes