And so Priscilla carried the day.  They went down to breakfast, and during the meal Hugh would speak to nobody.  When the gloomy meal was over he took his pipe and walked out to the cottage.  It was an untidy-looking, rickety place, small and desolate, with a pretension about it of the lowest order, a pretension that was evidently ashamed of itself.  There was a porch.  And the one sitting-room had what the late Mr Soames had always called his bow window.  But the porch looked as though it were tumbling down, and the bow window looked as though it were tumbling out.  The parlour and the bedroom over it had been papered but the paper was torn and soiled, and in sundry places was hanging loose.  There was a miserable little room called a kitchen to the right as you entered the door, in which the grate was worn out, and behind this was a shed with a copper.  In the garden there remained the stumps and stalks of Mr Soames’s cabbages, and there were weeds in plenty, and a damp hole among some elder bushes called an arbour.  It was named Laburnum Cottage, from a shrub that grew at the end of the house.  Hugh Stanbury shuddered as he stood smoking among the cabbage-stalks.  How could a man ask such a girl as Nora Rowley to be his wife, whose mother lived in a place like this?  While he was still standing in the garden, and thinking of Priscilla’s obstinacy and his own ten guineas a week, and the sort of life which he lived in London where he dined usually at his club, and denied himself nothing in the way of pipes, beer, and beef-steaks, he heard a step behind him, and turning round, saw his elder sister.

‘Hugh,’ she said, ‘you must not be angry with me.’

‘But I am angry with you.’

’I know you are; but you are unjust.  I am doing what I am sure is right.’

‘I never saw such a beastly hole as this in all my life.’

’I don’t think it beastly at all.  You’ll find that I’ll make it nice.  Whatever we want here you shall give us.  You are not to think that I am too proud to take anything at your hands.  It is not that.’

‘It’s very like it.’

’I have never refused anything that is reasonable, but it is quite unreasonable that we should go on living in such a place as that, as though we had three or four hundred a year of our own.  If mamma got used to the comfort of it, it would be hard then upon her to move.  You shall give her what you can afford, and what is reasonable; but it is madness to think of living there.  I couldn’t do it.’

‘You’re to have your way at any rate, it seems.’

’But you must not quarrel with me, Hugh.  Give me a kiss.  I don’t have you often with me; and yet you are the only man in the world that I ever speak to, or even know.  I sometimes half think that the bread is so hard and the water so bitter, that life will become impossible.  I try to get over it; but if you were to go away from me in anger, I should be so beaten for a week or two that I could do nothing.’