A week passed without reply.

By discreet inquiry Gammon learnt that Mrs. Clover had assumed the garb of widowhood, and this was quite enough.

“There,” he said to himself, “there’s an end of lies!” And he shook his shoulders as if to get quite clear of the unpleasant entanglement; for, Mr. Gammon, though ingenious at a pinch, had no natural bent towards falsehood.  To be rid at almost the same moment of Mr. Clover and Polly Sparkes seemed to him marvellous good luck; and in these bitter, sodden days of the early year he was lighter hearted than for many months.

He had heard from Polly: 

“DEAR MR. GAMMON,

“I don’t think we are suited to each other, which is better for both parties.  I shall send you a wedding-card in a few days, and I’m sure I wish you all happiness.  And so I remain with my best respects,

“Yours truly
Miss SPARKES”

This time Mr. Gammon felt no restraint upon his mirth.  He threw his head back and roared joyously.  That same day he went to a jeweller’s and purchased—­for more than he could afford—­a suitable trinket, and sent it with a well-meaning note to Polly’s address.

Winter brightened into spring, spring bloomed into summer.  Gammon had paid several visits to the china shop, where all was going very well indeed.  Minnie Clover now spent her evenings almost invariably with the young man interested in ceramic art, but it never disturbed Gammon to have ocular evidence of the fact.  With Mrs. Clover he conversed in the respectfully familiar tone of an old friend, now and then reporting little matters which concerned his own welfare, such as his growing conviction that at Quodlings’ he had found a “permanency,” and his decision to go no more to Dulwich, to sell all his bow-wows, to find another employment for leisure hours.

But he was not wholly at ease.  Time after time he had purposed making a confession to Mrs. Clover, time after time he “funked it”—­his own mental phrase—­and put it off.

He grew discontented with his room at Mrs. Bubb’s.  In getting up these bright mornings he looked with entirely new distaste upon the prospect from his window at the back.  Beneath lay parallel strips of ground, divided from each other by low walls.  These were called the “gardens” of the houses in Kennington Road, but no blade of grass ever showed upon the black, hard-trodden soil.  Lank fowls ran about among discarded furniture and indescribable rubbish, or children—­ few as well-tended as Mrs. Bubb’s—­played and squabbled under the dropping soot.  Beyond rose a huge block of tenements, each story entered from an external platform, the levels connected by flights of iron steps; the lofty roof, used as a drying ground by the female population, was surrounded with iron railings.  Gammon had hitherto seen nothing disagreeable in this outlook, nor had the shrieks and curses which at night too frequently sounded from the huge building ever troubled his repose.  But he was growing fastidious.  He thought constantly of a clean little street not far from Battersea Park—­of a gleaming china shop—­of a little parlour which seemed to him the perfection of comfort and elegance.