Chagrined and puzzled, she hastily set the kettle over the crackling coal, discovering a second later that she had overslept herself because Mr. Constant wished to be woke three-quarters of an hour earlier than usual, and to have his breakfast at seven, having to speak at an early meeting of discontented tram-men.  She ran at once, candle in hand, to his bedroom.  It was upstairs.  All “upstairs” was Arthur Constant’s domain, for it consisted of but two mutually independent rooms.  Mrs. Drabdump knocked viciously at the door of the one he used for a bedroom, crying, “Seven o’clock, sir.  You’ll be late, sir.  You must get up at once.”  The usual slumbrous “All right” was not forthcoming; but, as she herself had varied her morning salute, her ear was less expectant of the echo.  She went downstairs, with no foreboding save that the kettle would come off second best in the race between its boiling and her lodger’s dressing.

For she knew there was no fear of Arthur Constant’s lying deaf to the call of Duty—­temporarily represented by Mrs. Drabdump.  He was a light sleeper, and the tram-conductors’ bells were probably ringing in his ears, summoning him to the meeting.  Why Arthur Constant, B.A.—­white-handed and white-shirted, and gentleman to the very purse of him—­should concern himself with tram-men, when fortune had confined his necessary relations with drivers to cabmen at the least, Mrs. Drabdump could not quite make out.  He probably aspired to represent Bow in Parliament; but then it would surely have been wiser to lodge with a landlady who possessed a vote by having a husband alive.  Nor was there much practical wisdom in his wish to black his own boots (an occupation in which he shone but little), and to live in every way like a Bow working man.  Bow working men were not so lavish in their patronage of water, whether existing in drinking-glasses, morning tubs, or laundress’s establishments.  Nor did they eat the delicacies with which Mrs. Drabdump supplied him, with the assurance that they were the artisan’s appanage.  She could not bear to see him eat things unbefitting his station.  Arthur Constant opened his mouth and ate what his landlady gave him, not first deliberately shutting his eyes according to the formula, the rather pluming himself on keeping them very wide open.  But it is difficult for saints to see through their own halos; and in practice an aureola about the head is often indistinguishable from a mist.

The tea to be scalded in Mr. Constant’s pot, when that cantankerous kettle should boil, was not the coarse mixture of black and green sacred to herself and Mr. Mortlake, of whom the thoughts of breakfast now reminded her.  Poor Mr. Mortlake, gone off without any to Devonport, somewhere about four in the fog-thickened darkness of a winter night!  Well, she hoped his journey would be duly rewarded, that his perks would be heavy, and that he would make as good a thing out of the “travelling expenses” as rival labour leaders roundly accused him of to other