down with trouble. You must give her time, and she will do our
work. She wants the money, but she is long past being excited at the
prospect of it."

"What's that you're whispering?" asked she sharply.

Campbell stamped with impatience.

"You don't trust us yet, eh?--then, there!" and he took five sovereigns
from his pocket, and tossed them on the table. "There's your money! I
trust you to do the work, as you've been paid beforehand."

She caught up the gold, rang every piece on the table to see if it was
sound; and then--

"Sally, you go down with these gentlemen to the Jonson's Head, and if he
ben't there, go to the Fighting Cocks; and if he ben't there, go to the
Duke of Wellington; and tell he there's two gentlemen has heard of his
poetry, and wants to hear 'un excite. And then you give he a glass of
liquor, and praise up his nonsense, and he'll tell you all he knows, and
a sight more. Gi' un plenty to drink. It'll be a saving and a charity,
for if he don't get it out of you, he will out of me."

And she returned doggedly to her washing.

"Can't I do anything for you?" asked Tom, whose heart always yearned
over a Berkshire soul. "I have plenty of friends down at Whitbury
still."

"More than I have. No, sir," said she sadly, and with the first touch of
sweetness they had yet heard in her voice. "I've cured my own bacon, and
I must eat it. There's none down there minds me, but them that would be
ashamed of me. And I couldn't go without he, and they wouldn't take he
in; so I must just bide." And she went on washing.

"God help her!" said Campbell, as he went downstairs.

"Misery breeds that temper, and only misery, in our people. I can show
you as thorough gentlemen and ladies, people round Whitbury, living on
ten shillings a week, as you will show me in Belgravia living on five
thousand a year."

"I don't doubt it," said Campbell.... "So 'she couldn't go without he,'
drunken dog as he is! Thus it is with them all the world over."

"So much the worse for them," said Tom cynically, "and for the men too.
They make fools of us first with our over-fondness of them; and then
they let us make fools of ourselves with their over-fondness of us."

"I fancy sometimes that they were all meant to be the mates of angels,
and stooped to men as a _pis aller_; reversing the old story of the sons
of heaven and the daughters of men."

"And accounting for the present degeneracy. When the sons of heaven
married the daught