weeks and then returning it
only superficially repaired and secretly injured more vitally "for the
good of the trade." The evil vision vanished as quickly as it came,
exorcised by the deep boom of St. Dunstan's bells chiming the
three-quarters. In its place a great horror surged. Instinct had failed;
Mrs. Drabdump had risen at half-past six instead of six. Now she
understood why she had been feeling so dazed and strange and sleepy. She
had overslept herself.

Chagrined and puzzled, she hastily set the kettle over the crackling
coal, discovering a second later that she had overslept herself because
Mr. Constant wished to be woke three-quarters of an hour earlier than
usual, and to have his breakfast at seven, having to speak at an early
meeting of discontented tram-men. She ran at once, candle in hand, to
his bedroom. It was upstairs. All "upstairs" was Arthur Constant's
domain, for it consisted of but two mutually independent rooms. Mrs.
Drabdump knocked viciously at the door of the one he used for a bedroom,
crying, "Seven o'clock, sir. You'll be late, sir. You must get up at
once." The usual slumbrous "All right" was not forthcoming; but, as she
herself had varied her morning salute, her ear was less expectant of the
echo. She went downstairs, with no foreboding save that the kettle would
come off second best in the race between its boiling and her lodger's
dressing.

For she knew there was no fear of Arthur Constant's lying deaf to the
call of duty--temporarily represented by Mrs. Drabdump. He was a light
sleeper, and the tram conductors' bells were probably ringing in his
ears, summoning him to the meeting. Why Arthur Constant, B.
A.--white-handed and white-shirted, and gentleman to the very purse of
him--should concern himself with tram-men, when fortune had confined his
necessary relations with drivers to cabmen at the least, Mrs. Drabdump
could not quite make out. He probably aspired to represent Bow in
Parliament; but then it would surely have been wiser to lodge with a
landlady who possessed a vote by having a husband alive. Nor was there
much practical wisdom in his wish to black his own boots (an occupation
in which he shone but little), and to live in every way like a Bow
working man. Bow working men were not so lavish in their patronage of
water, whether existing in drinking glasses, morning tubs, or laundress'
establishments. Nor did they eat the delicacies with which Mrs. Drabdump
supplied him, with the