Miss Vickers hesitated, but, observing the striking improvement in the visitor’s attire effected by temperance, allowed a curt refusal to remain unspoken.  Mr. Vickers protested hotly.

“That’ll do,” said his daughter, indecision vanishing at sight of her father’s opposition; “if Bill Russell likes to come in and try and do you good, he can.”

Mr. Vickers said that he wouldn’t have him, but under compulsion stayed indoors the following evening, while Mr. Russell, by means of coloured diagrams, cheerfully lent by his new friends, tried to show him the inroads made by drink upon the human frame.  He sat, as Miss Vickers remarked, like a wooden image, and was only moved to animation by a picture of cirrhosis of the liver, which he described as being very pretty.

At the end of a week Mr. Vickers’s principles remained unshaken, and so far Mr. Russell had made not the slightest progress in his designs upon the affections of Selina.  That lady, indeed, treated him with but scant courtesy, and on two occasions had left him to visit Mr. Tasker; Mr. Vickers’s undisguised amusement at such times being hard to bear.

“Don’t give up, Bill,” he said, encouragingly, as Mr. Russell sat glum and silent; “read over them beautiful ‘Verses to a Tea-pot’ agin, and try and read them as if you ‘adn’t got your mouth full o’ fish-bait.  You’re wasting time.”

“I don’t want none o’ your talk,” said his disappointed friend.  “If you ain’t careful I’ll tell Selina about you going up to her papers.”

The smile faded from Mr. Vickers’s face.  “Don’t make mischief, Bill,” he said, uneasily.

“Well, don’t you try and make fun o’ me,” said Mr. Russell, ferociously.  “Taking the pledge is ’ard enough to bear without having remarks from you.”

“I didn’t mean them to be remarks, Bill,” said the other, mildly.  “But if you tell about me, you know, Selina’ll see through your little game.”

“I’m about sick o’ the whole thing,” said Mr. Russell, desperately.  “I ain’t ‘ad a drink outside o’ my own house for pretty near a fortnight.  I shall ask Selina to-morrow night, and settle it.”

“Ask her?” said the amazed Mr. Vickers.  “Ask ’er what?”

“Ask ’er to marry me,” said the other, doggedly.

Mr. Vickers, thoroughly alarmed, argued with him in vain, the utmost concession he could wring from the determined Mr. Russell being a promise to give him a hint to get out of the way.

“I’ll do that for my own sake,” he said, frankly.  “I can do it better alone, and if your old woman is in you get her out too.  Ask ’er to go for a walk; that’ll please Selina.  I don’t know what the gal does want.  I thought turning teetotaler and setting a good example to you would do the trick, if anything would.”

Mrs. Vickers’s utter astonishment next evening, when her husband asked her to go for a walk, irritated that gentleman almost beyond endurance.  Convinced at last that he was not joking, she went upstairs and put on her bonnet, and then stood waiting for the reluctant Mr. Vickers with an air of almost bashful diffidence.