Enraged at the treatment he was receiving, Rawcliffe loudly declared that he would not budge.  Turpin warned him that if he had made no preparations for departure on Wednesday he would be forcibly ejected, and the door closed against him.

‘You haven’t the right to do it,’ shouted the lodger.  ’I’ll sue you for damages.’

‘And I,’ retorted the carpenter, ‘will sue you for the money you owe me!’

The end could not be doubtful.  Rawcliffe, besides being a poor creature, knew very well that it was dangerous for him to get involved in a scandal; his stepfather, upon whom he depended, asked but a fair excuse for cutting him adrift, and more than one grave warning had come from his mother during the past few months.  But he enjoyed a little blustering, and even at breakfast-time on Wednesday his attitude was that of contemptuous defiance.  In vain had Mrs. Turpin tried to coax him with maternal suavity; in vain had Mabel and Lily, when serving his meals, whispered abuse of Miss Rodney, and promised to find some way of getting rid of her, so that Rawcliffe might return.  In a voice loud enough to be heard by his enemy in the opposite parlour, he declared that no ’cat of a school teacher should get the better of him.’  As a matter of fact, however, he arranged on Tuesday evening to take a couple of cheaper rooms just outside the town, and ordered a cab to come for him at eleven next morning.

‘You know what the understanding is, Mr. Rawcliffe,’ said Turpin, putting his head into the room as the lodger sat at breakfast.  ’I’m a man of my word.’

‘Don’t come bawling here!’ cried the other, with a face of scorn.

And at noon the house knew him no more.

Miss Rodney, on that same day, was able to offer her landlady a new lodger.  She had not spoken of this before, being resolved to triumph by mere force of will.

‘The next thing,’ she remarked to a friend, when telling the story, ’is to pack off one of the girls into service.  I shall manage it by Christmas,’ and she added with humorous complacency, ’it does one good to be making a sort of order in one’s own little corner of the world.’

*****

A CHARMING FAMILY

‘I must be firm,’ said Miss Shepperson to herself, as she poured out her morning tea with tremulous hand.  ‘I must really be very firm with them.’

Firmness was not the most legible characteristic of Miss Shepperson’s physiognomy.  A plain woman of something more than thirty, she had gentle eyes, a twitching forehead, and lips ever ready for a sympathetic smile.  Her attire, a little shabby, a little disorderly, well became the occupant of furnished lodgings, at twelve and sixpence a week, in the unpretentious suburb of Acton.  She was the daughter of a Hammersmith draper, at whose death, a few years ago, she had become possessed of a small house and an income of forty