“Talk of something you can understand, lass,” retorted the husband, in a voice that took any unkindness from the words, rather like a father than a husband.  “You don’t ail much for lack of company, I’m sure.”

“Now if it was only a good novel,” his wife persisted; “but nothing but travels, geographies, and such like.  Last thing he’s taken up with is the stars.  I suppose he’s been telling you about them—­” and she said this half as though it were a new form of lunacy Mr. Tipping had developed, and half as though he had been opening up new realms of knowledge—­original but useless.  She was far indeed from understanding that lonely mind and its tragedy, thirsting so hopelessly for knowledge, and to die athirst.  She heard him knock, knock all day upstairs; but the knocking told her nothing of his loneliness.  He was just a good, hard-working, rather cross old man, unaccountably fond of printed matter, whom she liked to be good to, and if in her time that knocking upstairs should stop for ever—­well! she wasn’t one to meet trouble half way, but she would miss it a good deal, old man as he was.

She was herself nearing fifty; but her slim little wiry body and her elfish, wrinkled face, never still, but ever alive with the same vivacity that years ago had attracted William Allsopp, made her seem younger than her years; and her husband treated her as though she were still a child, a wilful child.

“Eh, Matilda,” he said, “you’re just a child.  No more nor less,—­just a child.  The years haven’t tamed you one bit—­”

“Get out with you and your old stars!” she said, laughing.  “Henry, come along and have a talk with your old aunt.”

Though invincibly cheerful through it all, Aunt Tipping was always in trouble, if not for herself, for somebody else.  To-day, it was for herself, though it was but a minor reverse in the guerilla warfare of her life.  A distressed lodger who had just left had begged her to accept, in lieu of rent, the pawn-ticket of a handsome clock which had been hers in happier days; and Mrs. Tipping, moved as she always was by any tale of woe, however elaborate, had consented.  Nor in her world was such a way of settling accounts very exceptional, for pawn-tickets were there looked upon as legitimately negotiable securities.  Indeed, Aunt Tipping was seldom without a selection of such securities upon her hands; and, if a neighbour should chance to be in need, say, of a new set of chimney ornaments, as likely as not Aunt Tipping had in her purse a pledge for the very thing.  This she would sell at a reasonable profit, which would probably amount to but a small proportion of the original debt for which she had accepted it.  It was not a lucrative business, though there were occasional “bargains” in it.

In that word “bargains,” all the active romance of Aunt Tipping’s life was now centred.  In all departments of the cast-off and the second-hand she was a daring speculator; and a spirited “auction” now and again exhilarated her as much as a fortnight by the sea.  That house which she fought so desperately to keep tidy and respectable, had been furnished almost entirely in this way.  There was hardly an article in it that had not already lived other lives in other houses, before it had been picked up, “dirt cheap,” by Aunt Tipping.