woman, had made the soldier lover marry his despairing sweetheart, and
when he had promptly drunk himself to death, she had set her up in a
lodging-house which had thriven and enabled her to support herself and
her daughter decently.

In the second story of her respectable, dingy house there was a small
room which she went to some trouble to furnish up for her dead
mistress's friend. It was made into a bed-sitting-room with the aid of a
cot which Emily herself bought and disguised decently as a couch during
the daytime, by means of a red and blue Como blanket. The one window of
the room looked out upon a black little back-yard and a sooty wall on
which thin cats crept stealthily or sat and mournfully gazed at fate.
The Como rug played a large part in the decoration of the apartment. One
of them, with a piece of tape run through a hem, hung over the door in
the character of a _portière_; another covered a corner which was Miss
Fox-Seton's sole wardrobe. As she began to get work, the cheerful,
aspiring creature bought herself a Kensington carpet-square, as red as
Kensington art would permit it to be. She covered her chairs with
Turkey-red cotton, frilling them round the seats. Over her cheap white
muslin curtains (eight and eleven a pair at Robson's) she hung
Turkey-red draperies. She bought a cheap cushion at one of Liberty's
sales, and some bits of twopenny-halfpenny art china for her narrow
mantelpiece. A lacquered tea-tray and a tea-set of a single cup and
saucer, a plate and a teapot, made her feel herself almost sumptuous.
After a day spent in trudging about in the wet or cold of the streets,
doing other people's shopping, or searching for dressmakers or servants'
characters for her patrons, she used to think of her bed-sitting-room
with joyful anticipation. Mrs. Cupp always had a bright fire glowing in
her tiny grate when she came in, and when her lamp was lighted under its
home-made shade of crimson Japanese paper, its cheerful air, combining