“Of course I’m very sorry.  You’ve been a very good servant.  And in these days—­”

The child had acquired this turn of speech from her mother.  It did not appear to occur to either of them that they were living in the sixties.

“Thank ye, miss.”

“And what are you thinking of doing, Maggie?  You know you won’t get many places like this.”

“To tell ye the truth, Mrs. Povey, I’m going to get married mysen.”

“Indeed!” murmured Constance, with the perfunctoriness of habit in replying to these tidings.

“Oh! but I am, mum,” Maggie insisted.  “It’s all settled.  Mr. Hollins, mum.”

“Not Hollins, the fish-hawker!”

“Yes, mum.  I seem to fancy him.  You don’t remember as him and me was engaged in ’48.  He was my first, like.  I broke it off because he was in that Chartist lot, and I knew as Mr. Baines would never stand that.  Now he’s asked me again.  He’s been a widower this long time.”

“I’m sure I hope you’ll be happy, Maggie.  But what about his habits?”

“He won’t have no habits with me, Mrs. Povey.”

A woman was definitely emerging from the drudge.

When Maggie, having entirely ceased sobbing, had put the folded cloth in the table-drawer and departed with the tray, her mistress became frankly the girl again.  No primness about her as she stood alone there in the parlour; no pretence that Maggie’s notice to leave was an everyday document, to be casually glanced at—­as one glances at an unpaid bill!  She would be compelled to find a new servant, making solemn inquiries into character, and to train the new servant, and to talk to her from heights from which she had never addressed Maggie.  At that moment she had an illusion that there were no other available, suitable servants in the whole world.  And the arranged marriage?  She felt that this time—­the thirteenth or fourteenth time—­the engagement was serious and would only end at the altar.  The vision of Maggie and Hollins at the altar shocked her.  Marriage was a series of phenomena, and a general state, very holy and wonderful—­too sacred, somehow, for such creatures as Maggie and Hollins.  Her vague, instinctive revolt against such a usage of matrimony centred round the idea of a strong, eternal smell of fish.  However, the projected outrage on a hallowed institution troubled her much less than the imminent problem of domestic service.

She ran into the shop—­or she would have run if she had not checked her girlishness betimes—­and on her lips, ready to be whispered importantly into a husband’s astounded ear, were the words, “Maggie has given notice!  Yes!  Truly!” But Samuel Povey was engaged.  He was leaning over the counter and staring at an outspread paper upon which a certain Mr. Yardley was making strokes with a thick pencil.  Mr. Yardley, who had a long red beard, painted houses and rooms.  She knew him only by sight.  In her mind she always associated