and leaving no legacies.  Certainly, Cuckoo was not making money on the quiet enough in one night to keep her as seven or fourteen nights would formerly have supplied.  Mrs. Brigg questioned, remonstrated, stormed, sulked, was rude, insinuating, artful, blunt, and blackguardly—­all to no purpose.  Cuckoo would give no explanation of her conduct.  In the day she went out, but Mrs. Brigg was not to be deceived by that.  She based her observations and conclusions on weighty matters connected with the culinary art and with things about which her trained, disgraceful intelligence could not be deceived.  Cuckoo was falling into poverty.  In the eyes of Brigg she had formerly been in touch with riches, that is to say, she had—­so the landlady considered—­lived well.  She had got along without falling into debt.  The exorbitant rent, regularly earned, had been as regularly paid.  The Brigg perquisites had not been disputed.  No watchful eye had been directed upon the claws that grabbed and clung, the fingers that filched and retained.

But now was come a devastating change.  Cuckoo grown, or growing, poor was no longer easy-going.  Living much less well, she also began to keep a sharp eye on all she had.  If it went mysteriously, without explanatory action of her own, she called loudly on Brigg for enlightment.  Where had it gone?  The old lady, disgusted to be brought to subterfuge, a thing to which she was frankly unaccustomed, lied freely and with a good courage.  But her lies did not stand her in much stead with Cuckoo, who had, from the start, no intention whatever of believing any word she might say.  So war of a novel kind came about between them.  Mrs. Brigg was forced to live and hear herself named thief, a distressing circumstance which she could scarcely surmount with dignity, whatever she might manage in the way of fortitude.  Denial only armed forces for the attack.  Battles were numerous and violent.  Cuckoo, who had in some directions no perception at all of what was humiliating, took to measuring proportions of legs of mutton going down to Hades and remeasuring them on their return.  If the inches did not tally, Mrs. Brigg knew it.  Her soul revolted against such surveyor’s work on meat that her own hands had cooked.  She called Cuckoo names, and was called worse names in reply.  But still the measurings went on, and still Cuckoo spent her evenings within doors, sometimes without a fire in the winter cold.

Mrs. Brigg therefore said within herself that Cuckoo had gone to the bad, and beheld, with fancy’s agitated eye, a time in the near future when not only prequisites would be no more, but the very rent itself would be in jeopardy.  Fury sparkled in her heart.