’Mrs. Peckover has had a narrow escape of being poisoned.  She was found by one of her lodgers all but dead, and last night the police arrested her daughter on the charge.’

‘Mrs. Snowdon?’

’Yes.  The mother has accused her.  There’s a man concerned in the affair.  One of the men showed me a report in to-day’s paper; I didn’t buy one, because we shall have it in the Sunday paper to-morrow.  Nice business, oh?’

‘That’s for the old woman’s money, I’ll wager!’ exclaimed Hewett, in an awed voice.  ’I can believe it of Clem; if ever there was a downright bad ‘un!  Was she living in the Close?’

’Mrs. Snowdon wasn’t.  Somewhere in Hoxton.  No doubt it was for the money—­if the charge is true.  We won’t speak of it before the children.’

’Think of that, now!  Many’s the time I’ve looked at Clem Peckover and said to myself, “You’ll come to no good end, my lady!” She was a fierce an’ bad ‘un.’

Sidney nodded, and went off for his walk with Amy. . . .

It was a difficult thing to keep any room in the house orderly, and Sidney, as part of his struggle against the downward tendency in all about him, against the forces of chaos, often did the work of housemaid in the parlour; a little laxity in the rules which made this a sacred corner, and there would have been no spot where he could rest.  With some suceess, too, he had resisted the habit prevalent in working-class homes of prolonging Saturday evening’s occupations until the early hours of Sunday morning.  At a little after ten o’clock tonight John Hewett and the children were in bed; he too, weary in mind and body, would gladly have gone upstairs, but he lingered from one five minutes to the next, his heart sinking at the certainty that he would find Clara in sleepless misery which he had no power to allay.

Round the walls of the parlour were hung his own drawings, which used to conceal the bareness of his lodging in Tysoe Street.  It was three years since he had touched a pencil; the last time having been when he made holiday with Michael Snowdon and Jane at the farm-house by Danbury Hill.  The impulse would never come again.  It was associated with happiness, with hope; and What had his life to do with one or the other?  Could he have effected the change without the necessity of explaining it, he would gladly have put those drawings out of sight.  Whenever, as now, he consciously regarded them, they plucked painfully at his heart-strings, and threatened to make him a coward.

None of that!  He had his work to do, happiness or no happiness, and by all the virtue of manhood he would not fail in it—­as far as success or failure was a question of his own resolve.