ndeed! A baby make no
difference! And who's to tend on the lodgers, and bring in the grist to
the mill, if all my time, day and night, is taken up minding the baby!'

'Well, well,' said Mr Franklin. He was as peaceable as his wife was the
reverse. He did not want the baby, but neither did he wish to send poor
John's child to the workhouse.

'You must make the best of it, wife,' he said. 'Martha'll help you, and
I daresay Peter and Flossy will take a turn in looking after the young
'un.'

Mrs Franklin said no more; she went up-stairs, and got a certain disused
attic into some sort of order. The attic was far away from the rest of
the house; it was the top story of a wing, which had been added on to the
tall, ramshackle old house. In some of the rooms underneath, the
Franklin family themselves slept; in others they lived, and in others
they cooked. The rest of the house, therefore, was free for the
accommodation of lodgers.

Mrs Franklin earned the family bread by taking in lodgers. She was far
more active than her husband, who had a very small clerkship in the city;
without her aid the children, Peter and Flossy, could scarcely have
lived, but by dint of toiling from morning to night, of saving every
penny, of turning and re-turning worn-out clothes, and scrubbing and
cooking and brushing and cleaning, Mrs Franklin contrived to make two
ends meet. Her lodgers said that the rooms they occupied were clean and
neat, that their food was well cooked, and above all things that the
house was quiet. Therefore they stayed on; year after year the same
people lived in the parlours, and occupied the genteel drawing-room
floor; and hard as her lot was, Mrs Franklin considered herself a lucky
woman, and her neighbours often envied her.

The house where the Franklins lived was in one of those remote old-world
half-forgotten squares which are to be found at the back of Bloomsbury.
In their day these squares had seen fashion and life, but the gay world
had long, long ago passed them by and forgotten them, and in consequence,
although the houses were large and commodious, the rents were low.

Things had gone fairly well with the Franklins since they took the old
house--that is, things had gone fairly well until the arrival of the
baby--but, as Mrs Franklin said to her husband, no baby could come into
any house without making a sight of difference. She had only two
servants to help her in all her heavy work, and how could