The opportunity he desired was not long in offering itself.  Having made an excellent breakfast, he dragged his chair up to the fender again, and reached a pipe from the mantel-piece, where he had left it last night.  Tobacco he carried loose in his waistcoat pocket; it came forth in the form of yellowish dust, intermingled with all sorts of alien scraps.  When be had lit his pipe, he poised the chair on its hind-legs, clasped his hands over his bald crown, and continued his musing with an air of amiable calm.  Smoke curled up from the corner of his loose lips, and occasionally, removing his pipe for an instant, he spat skilfully between the bars of the grate.  Assured of his comfort, Mrs. Peckover said she must go and look after certain domestic duties.  Her daughter had begun to clean some vegetables that would be cooked for dinner.

‘How old may you be, Clem?’ Mr. Snowdon inquired genially, when they had been alone together for a few minutes.

‘What’s that to you?  Guess.’

’Why, let me see; you was not much more than a baby when I went away.  You’ll be eighteen or nineteen, I suppose.’

’Yes, I’m nineteen—­last sixth of February.  Pity you come too late to give me a birthday present, ain’t it?’

’Ah!  And who’d have thought you’d have grown up such a beauty!  I say, Clem, how many of the young chaps about here have been wanting to marry you, eh?’

‘A dozen or two, I dessay,’ Clem replied, shrugging her shoulders scornfully.

Mr. Snowdon laughed, and then spat into the fire.

‘Tell me about some o’ them, will you?  Who is it you’re keeping company with now?’

’Who, indeed?  Why, there isn’t one I’d look at!  Several of ’em’s took to drinking ’cause I won’t have nothing to do with ’em.’

This excited Mr. Snowdon’s mirth in a high degree; he rolled on his chair, and almost pitched backwards.

’I suppose you give one or other a bit of encouragement now and then, just to make a fool of him, eh?’

’Course I do.  There was Bob Hewett; he used to lodge here, but that was after your time.  I kep’ him off an’ on till he couldn’t bear it no longer; then he went an’ married a common slut of a thing, just because he thought it ’ud make me mad.  Ha, ha!  I believe he’d give her poison an’ risk it any day, if only I promised to marry him afterwards.  Then there was a feller called Jeck Bartley.  I set him an’ Bob fightin’ one Bank-holiday—­you should a’ seen ’em go at it!  Jack went an’ got married a year ago to a girl called Suke Jollop; her mother forced him.  How I did laugh!  Last Christmas Day they smashed up their ‘ome an’ threw the bits out into the street.  Jack got one of his eyes knocked out—­I thought I should a’ died o’ laughin’ when I saw him next mornin’.’

The hearer became uproarious in merriment.

‘Tell you what it is, Clem,’ he cried, ’you’re something like a girl!  Darn me if I don’t like you!  I say, I wonder what my daughter’s grown up?  Like her mother, I suppose.  You an’ she was sort of sisters, wasn’t you?’