talker, but now he talked no more. Neither did Mrs. Bunting, but
then she had always been a silent woman, and that was perhaps one
reason why Bunting had felt drawn to her from the very first moment
he had seen her.

It had fallen out in this way. A lady had just engaged him as
butler, and he had been shown, by the man whose place he was to
take, into the dining-room. There, to use his own expression, he
had discovered Ellen Green, carefully pouring out the glass of port
wine which her then mistress always drank at 11.30 every morning.
And as he, the new butler, had seen her engaged in this task, as he
had watched her carefully stopper the decanter and put it back into
the old wine-cooler, he had said to himself, "That is the woman for
me!"

But now her stillness, her--her dumbness, had got on the
unfortunate man's nerves. He no longer felt like going into the
various little shops, close by, patronised by him in more prosperous
days, and Mrs. Bunting also went afield to make the slender purchases
which still had to be made every day or two, if they were to be
saved from actually starving to death.

Suddenly, across the stillness of the dark November evening there
came the muffled sounds of hurrying feet and of loud, shrill shouting
outside--boys crying the late afternoon editions of the evening
papers.

Bunting turned uneasily in his chair. The giving up of a daily
paper had been, after his tobacco, his bitterest deprivation. And
the paper was an older habit than the tobacco, for servants are