books, and you can hardly get him away
for his meals. He's no company for any one."

"Talk of something you can understand, lass," retorted the husband, in a
voice that took any unkindness from the words, rather like a father than
a husband. "You don't ail much for lack of company, I'm sure."

"Now if it was only a good novel," his wife persisted; "but nothing but
travels, geographies, and such like. Last thing he's taken up with is
the stars. I suppose he's been telling you about them--" and she said
this half as though it were a new form of lunacy Mr. Tipping had
developed, and half as though he had been opening up new realms of
knowledge--original but useless. She was far indeed from understanding
that lonely mind and its tragedy, thirsting so hopelessly for
knowledge, and to die athirst. She heard him knock, knock all day
upstairs; but the knocking told her nothing of his loneliness. He was
just a good, hard-working, rather cross old man, unaccountably fond of
printed matter, whom she liked to be good to, and if in her time that
knocking upstairs should stop for ever--well! she wasn't one to meet
trouble half way, but she would miss it a good deal, old man as he was.

She was herself nearing fifty; but her slim little wiry body and her
elfish, wrinkled face, never still, but ever alive with the same
vivacity that years ago had attracted William Allsopp, made her seem
younger than her years; and her husband treated her as though she were
still a child, a wilful child.

"Eh, Matilda," he said, "you're just a child. No more nor less,--just a
child. The years haven't tamed you one bit--"

"Get out with you and your old stars!" she said, laughing. "Henry, come
along and have a talk with your old aunt."

Though invincibly cheerful through it all, Aunt Tipping was always in
trouble, if not for herself, for somebody else. To-day, it was for
herself, though it was but a minor reverse in the guerilla warfare of
her life. A distressed lodger who had just left had begged her to
accept, in lieu of rent, the pawn-ticket of a handsome clock which had
been hers in happier days; and Mrs. Tipping, moved as she always was by
any tale of woe, however elaborate, had consented. Nor in her world was
such a way of settling accounts very exceptional, for pawn-tickets were
there looked upon as legitimately negotiable securities. Indeed, Aunt
Tipping was seldom without a selection of such securities upon her
hands; and, if a neighbour s