it proved to be no trump.

"I would neither marry you nor go out with you, nor do I wish to have
anything to say to you, except so far as business is concerned. As that
seems impossible, it will be better for me to give you a week's notice,
Mr. Slotman."

"You'll be sorry for it," he said--"infernally sorry for it. It ain't
pleasant to starve, my girl!"

"I had to do it, I had to, or I could not have respected myself any
longer," the girl thought, as she made her way home that evening to the
boarding-house, where for two pounds a week she was fed and lodged. But
to be workless! It had been the nightmare of her dreams, the haunting
fear of her waking hours.

In her room at the back of the house, to which the jingle of the
boarding-house piano could yet penetrate, she sat for a time in deep
thought. The past had held a few friends, folk who had been kind to her.
Pride had held her back; she had never asked help of any of them. She
thought of the Australian uncle who had invited her to come out to him
when she should leave school, and then had for some reason changed his
mind and sent her a banknote for a hundred pounds instead. She had felt
glad and relieved at the time, but now she regretted his decision. Yet
there had been a few friends; she wrote down the names as they occurred
to her.

There was old General Bartholomew, who had known her father. There was
Mrs. Ransome. No, she believed now that she had heard that Mrs. Ransome
was dead; perhaps the General too, yet she would risk it. There was
Lady Linden, Marjorie Linden's aunt. She knew but little of her, but
remembered her as at heart a kindly, though an autocratic dame. She
remembered, too, that one of Lady Linden's hobbies had been to establish
Working Guilds and Rural Industries, Village Crafts, and suchlike in her
village. In connection with some of these there might be work for her.

She wrote to all that she could think of, a letter of which she made six
facsimile copies. It was not a begging appeal, but a dignified little
reminder of her existence.

"If you could assist me to obtain any work by which I might live, you
would be putting me under a deep debt of gratitude," she wrote.

Before she slept that night all six letters were in the post. She wished
them good luck one by one as she dropped them into the letter-box, the
six sprats that had been flung into the sea of fortune. Would one of
them catch for her a mackerel? She wondered.

"You'd best