“Well, yer not to take ’em to heart, Em’ly.  It ull be when it will be—­for the Lord likes us to pray, but He’ll take his own time—­an’ she’s got troubles enough of her own, Nurse.  D’yer see as she’s leff off her ring?”

Marcella looked at Emily’s left hand, while the girl flushed all over, and ironed with a more fiery energy than before.

“I’ve ’eerd such things of ’im, Nurse, this last two days,” she said with low vehemence—­“as I’m never goin’ to wear it again.  It ’ud burn me!”

Emily was past twenty.  Some eighteen months before this date she had married a young painter.  After nearly a year of incredible misery her baby was born.  It died, and she very nearly died also, owing to the brutal ill-treatment of her husband.  As soon as she could get on her feet again, she tottered home to her widowed mother, broken for the time in mind and body, and filled with loathing of her tyrant.  He made no effort to recover her, and her family set to work to mend if they could what he had done.  The younger sister of fourteen was earning seven shillings a week at paper-bag making; the brother, a lad of eighteen, had been apprenticed by his mother, at the cost of heroic efforts some six years before, to the leather-currying trade, in a highly skilled branch of it, and was now taking sixteen shillings a week with the prospect of far better things in the future.  He at once put aside from his earnings enough to teach Emily “the shirt-ironing,” denying himself every indulgence till her training was over.

Then they had their reward.  Emily’s colour and spirits came back; her earnings made all the difference to the family between penury and ease; while she and her little sister kept the three tiny rooms in which they lived, and waited on their invalid mother, with exquisite cleanliness and care.

Marcella stood by the ironing-table a moment after the girl’s speech.

“Poor Emily!” she said softly, laying her hand on the ringless one that held down the shirt on the board.

Emily looked up at her in silence.  But the girl’s eyes glowed with things unsaid and inexpressible—­the “eternal passion, eternal pain,” which in half the human race have no voice.

“He was a very rough man was Em’ly’s husband,” said Mrs. Jervis, in her delicate thoughtful voice—­“a very uncultivated man.”

Marcella turned round to her, startled and amused by the adjective.  But the other two listeners took it quite quietly.  It seemed to them apparently to express what had to be said.

“It’s a sad thing is want of edication,” Mrs. Jervis went on in the same tone.  “Now there’s that lady there”—­with a little courtly wave of her hand towards Mrs. Burton—­“she can’t read yer know, Nurse, and I’m that sorry for her!  But I’ve been reading to her, an’ Emily—­just while my cough’s quiet—­one of my ole tracks.”

She held up a little paper-covered tract worn with use.  It was called “A Pennorth of Grace, or a Pound of Works?” Marcella looked at it in respectful silence as she put on her cloak.  Such things were not in her line.