as are born to the joy of life. Wealth inestimable is ever flowing
through these workshops, and the hands that have been stained with
gold-dust may, as likely as not, some day extend themselves in
petition for a crust. In this house, as the announcement tells you,
business is carried on by a trader in diamonds, and next door is a
den full of children who wait for their day's one meal until their
mother has come home with her chance earnings. A strange enough
region wherein to wander and muse. Inextinguishable laughter were
perchance the fittest result of such musing; yet somehow the heart
grows heavy, somehow the blood is troubled in its course, and the
pulses begin to throb hotly.

Amid the crowds of workpeople, Jane Snowdon made what speed she
might. It was her custom, whenever dispatched on an errand, to run
till she could run no longer, then to hasten along panting until
breath and strength were recovered. When it was either of the
Peckovers who sent her, she knew that reprimand was inevitable on
her return, be she ever so speedy; but her nature was incapable
alike of rebellion and of that sullen callousness which would have
come to the aid of most girls in her position. She did not serve her
tyrants with willingness, for their brutality filled her with a
sense of injustice; yet the fact that she was utterly dependent upon
them for her livelihood, that but for their grace--as they were
perpetually reminding her--she would have been a workhouse child,
had a mitigating effect upon the bitterness she could not wholly
subdue.

There was, however, another reason why she sped eagerly on her
present mission. The man to whom she was conveying Mrs. Hewett's
message was one of the very few persons who had ever treated her