She returned to London and presented herself to the ex-serving-woman.  Mrs. Cupp had indeed reason to remember her mistress gratefully.  At a time when youth and indiscreet affection had betrayed her disastrously, she had been saved from open disgrace and taken care of by Mrs. Maytham.

The old lady, who had then been a vigorous, sharp-tongued, middle-aged woman, had made the soldier lover marry his despairing sweetheart, and when he had promptly drunk himself to death, she had set her up in a lodging-house which had thriven and enabled her to support herself and her daughter decently.

In the second story of her respectable, dingy house there was a small room which she went to some trouble to furnish up for her dead mistress’s friend.  It was made into a bed-sitting-room with the aid of a cot which Emily herself bought and disguised decently as a couch during the daytime, by means of a red and blue Como blanket.  The one window of the room looked out upon a black little back-yard and a sooty wall on which thin cats crept stealthily or sat and mournfully gazed at fate.  The Como rug played a large part in the decoration of the apartment.  One of them, with a piece of tape run through a hem, hung over the door in the character of a portiere; another covered a corner which was Miss Fox-Seton’s sole wardrobe.  As she began to get work, the cheerful, aspiring creature bought herself a Kensington carpet-square, as red as Kensington art would permit it to be.  She covered her chairs with Turkey-red cotton, frilling them round the seats.  Over her cheap white muslin curtains (eight and eleven a pair at Robson’s) she hung Turkey-red draperies.  She bought a cheap cushion at one of Liberty’s sales, and some bits of twopenny-halfpenny art china for her narrow mantelpiece.  A lacquered tea-tray and a tea-set of a single cup and saucer, a plate and a teapot, made her feel herself almost sumptuous.  After a day spent in trudging about in the wet or cold of the streets, doing other people’s shopping, or searching for dressmakers or servants’ characters for her patrons, she used to think of her bed-sitting-room with joyful anticipation.  Mrs. Cupp always had a bright fire glowing in her tiny grate when she came in, and when her lamp was lighted under its home-made shade of crimson Japanese paper, its cheerful air, combining itself with the singing of her little, fat, black kettle on the hob, seemed absolute luxury to a tired, damp woman.

Mrs. Cupp and Jane Cupp were very kind and attentive to her.  No one who lived in the same house with her could have helped liking her.  She gave so little trouble, and was so expansively pleased by any attention, that the Cupps,—­who were sometimes rather bullied and snubbed by the “professionals” who generally occupied their other rooms,—­quite loved her.  Sometimes the “professionals,” extremely smart ladies and gentlemen who did turns at the balls or played small parts at theatres, were