by the claws of the landlady.  She had endured being ruthlessly rooked, with but little murmuring, as do so many of her patient class, accustomed to be the prey of each unit in the large congregation of the modern Fates.  For months and years she had paid a preposterous price for her badly furnished little rooms.  She had been overcharged habitually for every morsel of food she ate, every drop of beer or of tea she drank, every fire that was kindled in her badly cleaned grate, every candle that lighted her, almost every match she struck.  She and Mrs. Brigg had had many rows, had, times without number, lifted up their respective voices in vituperation, and shown command of large and vile vocabularies.  But these rows had not been on the occasion of the open cheating of the former by the latter.  Fallen women, as they are called, seldom resent being cheated by those in whose houses they live.  Rather do they expect the bleeding process as part of the penalty to be paid for a lost character.  The landlord of the leper is owed, for his charity and tolerance, good hard cash.  The landlady of the Pariah puts down mentally in each added-up bill this item:  “To loss of character—­so much.”  And the Pariah understands and pays.  Such is the recognized dispensation.  Mrs. Brigg had had a fine time of robbery during the stay of Cuckoo in her ugly house, and, in consequence, a certain queer and slow respect for her lodger had very gradually grown up in her withered and gnarled old nature.  She had that feeling towards Cuckoo that a bad boy, too weak to steal apples, has towards a bad boy not too weak to steal them.  It could hardly be called an actual liking.  Of that the old creature in her nethermost Hades was nearly incapable.  But she enjoyed seeing apples off the tree lying in her kitchen, and so could have patted any hands that had gathered them nefariously.  So far as she looked into the future she saw there always Cuckoo, and herself robbing Cuckoo comfortably, faithfully, unblamed and unrepentant, while the years rolled along, the leech ever at its sucking profession.

Now this agreeable vision was abruptly changed.  This slide of the magic lantern was smashed to fragments.  And Mrs. Brigg was filled with the righteous anger of a balked and venerable robber.  As a mother, dependent upon the earnings of her child in some godly profession might feel on the abrupt and reasonless refusal of that child to continue in it, so did Mrs. Brigg feel now.

The lady of the feathers had, for the moment at least, given up her profession.  She sat at home with folded hands at night.  It was earth-shaking.  It stirred the depths of the Brigg being.  Quakings of a world in commotion were as nothing to it.  And the sweet Brigg dream that had dawned on the last night of the old year, dream of a rich “toff” in love with Cuckoo and winding her up to gilded circles, in which the fall of night set gay ladies bareheaded, and scattered all feathered hats to limbo, died childless