lines round the edges of a common cup and saucer, and speculated upon the means by which it was arrived at.  A girl drew those lines, a girl with a hand as sure as Giotto’s, and no better tools than a couple of brushes and a small revolving table called a whirler.  Forty-eight hours a week Mary Beechinor sat before her whirler.  Actuating the treadle, she placed a piece of ware on the flying disc, and with a single unerring flip of the finger pushed it precisely to the centre; then she held the full brush firmly against the ware, and in three seconds the band encircled it truly; another brush taken up, and the line below the band also stood complete.  And this process was repeated, with miraculous swiftness, hour after hour, week after week, year after year.  Mary could decorate over thirty dozen cups and saucers in a day, at three halfpence the dozen.  ‘Doesn’t she ever do anything else?’ some visitor might curiously inquire, whom Titus Price was showing over his ramshackle manufactory.  ‘No, always the same thing,’ Titus would answer, made proud for the moment of this phenomenon of stupendous monotony.  ’I wonder how she can stand it—­she has a refined face,’ the visitor might remark; and Mary Beechinor was left alone again.  The idea that her work was monotonous probably never occurred to the girl.  It was her work—­as natural as sleep, or the knitting which she always did in the dinner-hour.  The calm and silent regularity of it had become part of her, deepening her original quiescence, and setting its seal upon her inmost spirit.  She was not in the fellowship of the other girls in the painting-shop.  She seldom joined their more boisterous diversions, nor talked their talk, and she never manoeuvred for their men.  But they liked her, and their attitude showed a certain respect, forced from them by they knew not what.  The powers in the office spoke of Mary Beechinor as ’a very superior girl.’

She ran downstairs after Mark, and he waited in the narrow hall, where there was scarcely room for two people to pass.  Mark looked at her inquiringly.  Rather thin, and by no means tall, she seemed the merest morsel by his side.  She was wearing her second-best crimson merino frock, partly to receive the doctor and partly because it was Saturday night; over this a plain bibless apron.  Her cold gray eyes faintly sparkled in anger above the cheeks white with watching, and the dropped corners of her mouth showed a contemptuous indignation.  Mary Beechinor was ominously roused from the accustomed calm of years.  Yet Mark at first had no suspicion that she was disturbed.  To him that pale and inviolate face, even while it cast a spell over him, gave no sign of the fires within.

She took him by the coat-sleeve and silently directed him into the gloomy little parlour crowded with mahogany and horsehair furniture, white antimacassars, wax flowers under glass, and ponderous gilt-clasped Bibles.

‘It’s a cruel shame!’ she whispered, as though afraid of being overheard by the dying man upstairs.