"I have five shillings in my purse; I'll go out and buy a cheap mattress. But then there's Lazarus! Oh dear!"
"Lazarus has his own bed. Yes, yes, thank God, we'll be able to borrow his wedding furniture."
"But it's all stored away in the Jonas's attic."
A smart rat-tat at the door denoted the inopportune return of Lazarus himself. Salvina darted upstairs to let him in and break the shock. He was a slimmer and more elegant edition of his father, a year older than Kitty, and taller than Salvina by a jaunty head and shoulders.
"And why isn't the hall lamp alight?" he queried, as her white face showed itself in the dusky door-slit. "It looks so beastly shabby. The only light's in the kitchen; I daresay you and the mater are pigging there again. Why can't you live up to your position?"
The unexpected reproach broke her down. "We have no position any more," she sobbed out. And all the long years of paralyzing economies swept back to her memory, all the painful progress—accelerated by her growing salary—from the Hounsditch apartments to the bow-windows and gas-chandeliers of Hackney!
"What do you mean? What is the matter? Speak, you little fool! Don't cry." He came across the threshold and shook her roughly.
"Father's run away with the furniture and some woman," she explained chokingly.
"The devil!" The smart cane slipped from his fingers and he maintained his cigar in his mouth with difficulty. "Do you mean to say the old man has gone and—the beastly brute! The selfish hypocrite! But how could he get the furniture?"
"He made mother go on a visit to the Borough."