"Don't mind me," he said with a coarse laugh, "this is a free country."
"What do you want here?" demanded Mr. Chester angrily.
"You've got a bedroom to let; I made out the bill in the window----"
"All right, just you wait a bit." He turned to his wife.
"What's the matter with Sally?"
"She's took ill again. She fainted dead away again this afternoon, all of a sudden, and Dr. Lyons says she must have strengthening things."
Utterly forgetting her declaration that if her husband killed her she would not give him the money, Mrs. Chester dragged the fifteen pence out of her pocket, and flinging it upon the table, cried passionately:
"Take it! and drink the child's life away!"
"Not quite so bad as that, old woman," he said, in a shame-faced tone, "I've enough to reproach myself with one. Is Sal asleep?"
His question was answered by the pattering of two little bare feet, and Sally herself appeared from an inner room, which, with the parlour in which this scene was taking place, formed the domestic establishment of the Chester family.