making room for the sins of the coming day.  But Sarah Brown’s conscience was dreadfully receptive, almost magnetic; little sins like smuts lay always deep upon it.  There were a few regrettable seconds in every minute she lived, I think, though she never enjoyed the compensations attached to a really considerable sin.  Anyway her conscience would have been a case for pumice-stone, and when she was happy she always tried to forget it.  Yet she was not without a good many very small and unessential resources for sleepless moments.  Often she wrote vague comments on matters with which she was not familiar, in an exercise-book, always eventually mislaid.  She would awake from dear and unspeakable dreams full of hope, and tell herself stories about herself, trying on various lives and deaths like clothes.  The result was never likely enough even to laugh at.

To-day she had watched magic dancing in a mackintosh, and she was at a loss.

There was a knock upon her door, and a voice:  “Hi, cocky, could you oblige me with a loan of a few ’alfpence for the milkman.  I ’aven’t a bean in me purse.”

“Nor have I,” said Sarah Brown, opening the door.  “But I can pawn—­”

“Ow, come awf it, Cuffbut,” said the fellow-lodger.  “This is a respectable ‘ouse, more or less, and you ain’t goin’ out to pawn nothink in your py-jams.  I’ll owe it to the milkman again.  Not but what I ’adn’t p’raps better pay ’im after all.  I got me money paid yesterday, on’y I ’ad thought to put it away for Elbert.”

“Are you Peony, the other lodger?”

“Thet’s right, dearie.”

Peony was not in her first youth, in fact she was comfortably into her second.  Her voice was so beautiful that it almost made one shy, but her choice of language, tending as it did in the other direction, reassured one.  She had fine eyes of an absolute grey, and dark hair parted in the middle and drawn down so as to make a triangle of a face which, left to itself, would have been square.  Her teeth spoilt her; the gaps among them looked like the front row of the stalls during the first scene of a revue, or the last scene of a play by Shakspere.  On the whole, she looked like the duckling of the story, serenely conscious of a secret swanhood.  She showed unnatural energy even in repose, and lived as though she had a taxi waiting at the door.

“Who’s Elbert?” asked Sarah Brown, and then wished she had not asked, for even without Peony’s flush she should have guessed.

“‘Arf a mo, kiddie, till I get rid of the milkman.  Come an’ sit on the stairs, an’ I’ll tell you a tale.  I like no end tellin’ this tale.”

Harold the Broomstick was desultorily sweeping the stairs.  He worked harder when first conscious of being watched, but seeing that they intended to stay there, on the top step, he made this the excuse to disappear indolently, leaving little heaps of dust on several of the lower steps.