“Curious,” said the girl, “so am I. My father’s a mill manager near Bolton. You weren’t educated there?” “But even that would not make him a Christian,” argued Joan.!

“What are your principles?” she asked him. “Have you got any?” “How did he feel?” he asked her, leaning forward.

“Let me know what allowance you would like me to make you, when you have thought it out. Things are not what they were at the works, but there will always be enough to keep you in comfort,” he had told her. She had fixed it there and then at two hundred a year. She would not take more, and that only until she was in a position to keep herself. Joan had gone out in September, and for a while the weather was pleasant. The men, wrapped up in their great-coats, would sleep for preference under the great sycamore trees. Through open doorways she would catch glimpses of picturesque groups of eager card-players, crowded round a flickering candle. From the darkness there would steal the sound of flute or zither, of voices singing. Occasionally it would be some strident ditty of the Paris music-halls, but more often it was sad and plaintive. But early in October the rains commenced and the stream became a roaring torrent, and a clammy mist lay like a white river between the wooded hills. He followed it up with another. This one with a chorus, consisting chiefly of “Umpty Umpty Umpty Umpty Ay,” which was vociferously encored.