it lay about the floor or under the bed, she did not for a moment question his sanity.  She obeyed him like a dog; uncomprehending, but trustful.  But, after all, this was only of a piece with the rest of her life.  There was nothing she questioned.  Life stood at her bedside every morning in the cold dawn, bearing a day heaped high with duties; and she jumped cheerfully out of her warm bed and took them up one by one, without question or murmur.  They were life.  Life had no other meaning any more than it has for the omnibus hack, which cannot conceive existence outside shafts, and devoid of the intermittent flick of a whip point.  The comparison is somewhat unjust; for Mary Ann did not fare nearly so well as the omnibus hack, having to make her meals off such scraps as even the lodgers sent back.  Mrs. Leadbatter was extremely economical, as much so with the provisions in her charge as with those she bought for herself.  She sedulously sent up remainders till they were expressly countermanded.  Less economical by nature, and hungrier by habit, Mary Ann had much trouble in restraining herself from surreptitious pickings.  Her conscience was rarely worsted; still there was a taint of dishonesty in her soul, else had the stairs been less of an ethical battle-ground for her.  Lancelot’s advent only made her hungrier; somehow the thought of nibbling at his provisions was too sacrilegious to be entertained.  And yet—­so queerly are we and life compounded—­she was probably less unhappy at this period than Lancelot, who would come home in the vilest of tempers, and tramp the room with thunder on his white brow.  Sometimes he and the piano and Beethoven would all be growling together, at other times they would all three be mute; Lancelot crouching in the twilight with his head in his hands, and Beethoven moping in the corner, and the closed piano looming in the background like a coffin of dead music.

One February evening—­an evening of sleet and mist—­Lancelot, who had gone out in evening dress, returned unexpectedly, bringing with him for the first time a visitor.  He was so perturbed that he forgot to use his latch-key, and Mary Ann, who opened the door, heard him say angrily, “Well, I can’t slam the door in your face, but I will tell you in your face I don’t think it at all gentlemanly of you to force yourself upon me like this.”

“My dear Lancelot, when did I ever set up to be a gentleman?  You know that was always your part of the contract.”  And a swarthy, thick-set young man with a big nose lowered the dripping umbrella he had been holding over Lancelot, and stepped from the gloom of the street into the fuscous cheerfulness of the ill-lit passage.

By this time Beethoven, who had been left at home, was in full ebullition upstairs, and darted at the intruder the moment his calves appeared.  Beethoven barked with short sharp snaps, as became a bilious liver-coloured Blenheim spaniel.