Often, while busily engaged in serving customers or in hearing and seeing things which, before she came to “Dawes’,” she would never have believed to be possible, she had a strong suspicion that old Orgles was watching her from the top of a flight of stairs or the tiny window in his room; it seemed that he was a wary old spider, she a fly, and that he was biding his time.  This impression saddened her; it also made her attend carefully to her duties, it being his place to deal with those of the staff who were remiss in their work.  It was only of an evening, when she was free of the shop, that she could be said to be anything like her old, light-hearted self.  She would wash, change her clothes, and scurry off to a ham and beef warehouse she had discovered in a turning off Oxford Street, where she would get her supper.  The shop was kept by a man named Siggers.  He was an affected little man, who wore his hair long; he minced about his shop and sliced his ham and beef with elaborate wavings of his carving knife and fork.  Mavis proving a regular customer, he let her eat her supper in the shop, providing her with knife, fork, tablecloth, and mustard.  Although married and henpecked, he affected to admire Mavis; while she ate her humble meal, he would forlornly look in her direction, sigh, and wearily support his shaggy head with his forefinger; but she could not help noticing that, when afflicted with this mood, he would often glance at himself in a large looking glass which faced him as he sat.  His demonstrations of regard never became more pronounced.  It was as much as Mavis could do to stop herself from laughing outright when she paid him, it being a signal mark of his confidence that he did not exact payment from her “on delivery of goods in order to prevent regrettable mistakes,” as printed cards, conspicuously placed in the shop, informed customers—­or clients, as Mr Siggers preferred to call them.

One night, Mavis, by the merest chance, made a discovery that gladdened her heart:  she lighted upon Soho.  She had read and loved her Fielding and Smollett when at Brandenburg College; the sight of the stately old houses at once awoke memories of Tom Jones, Parson Adams, Roderick Random, and Lady Bellaston, She did not immediately remember that those walls had sheltered the originals of these creations; when she realised this fact she got from the nearest lending library her old favourites and carefully re-read them.  She, also, remembered her dear father telling her that an ancestor of his, who had lived in Soho, had been killed in the thirties of the eighteenth century when fighting a famous duel; this, and the sorry dignity of the Soho houses, was enough to stir her imagination.  Night after night, she would elude the men who mostly followed her and walk along the less frequented of the sombre streets.  These she would people with the reckless beaux, the headstrong ladies of that bygone time; she would imagine the fierce loves, the