"I have often wondered," he said, "what became of poor Harper's daughter."
(To be concluded.)
[THREE GIRL-CHUMS, AND THEIR LIFE IN LONDON ROOMS.]
By FLORENCE SOPHIE DAVSON.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCES THE HOUSEHOLD.
On a raw, foggy-looking morning in November, three happy-looking girls sat in their cosy little sitting-room, taking their breakfast by lamplight. Neither the bitter weather, nor the fact that it was only eight o'clock on a winter morning, had power to damp their spirits. Their lives were much too full and occupied for any time to be given to depression. The tall, handsome girl of eighteen, with the brilliant complexion and nut-brown hair is Jane Orlingbury, the slighter one who sits at the side of the table near the fire is her sister Ada, the elder by five years. They are both eating their early breakfasts with hearty appetites, and quickly too, for there is not much time to lose. Ada is a type-writer in a very good office in the City. She has got on so well that she is earning £100 a year. Jane is a cookery teacher in a distant parish, and she must start off with her sister, for although her work does not begin so early as Ada's, who is due at her office at nine o'clock, she has a good way to go, and the marketing for her classes to do before she starts work at ten o'clock. The bright-eyed little woman at the head of the table, who is pouring out the coffee, is Marion Thomas. In appearance she presents a marked contrast to the two sisters, for she is short, plump, and dark. She lives with them, and does the housekeeping of the joint establishment and nearly all the cooking. If it were not for Marion, Ada laughingly tells their friends, it is more than probable that she and Jane, who come back in the evening rather tired and certainly disinclined for housework, would live altogether on tea, eggs, and toast, as some flippant individual once remarked that all women would be sure to do if left entirely to themselves. The Orlingburys and the Thomases all lived in the same little village in Nottinghamshire. About a year and a half ago the Orlingburys' home was broken up when their father died. The two girls warehoused their little stock of furniture, and spent some of the little capital that was left them in training to earn their own living, and as they had no relations with whom they could conveniently live, they stayed in a boarding-house while Ada was at Pitman's and Jane going backwards and forwards to the cookery-school. But they both felt a great lack of cosiness about the arrangement, and they were more than thankful when their old friend Marion, who had come to town a little time before them, and was staying with some cousins in Norland Square whilst she worked up a connection of music pupils, arranged to come and live with them.
Three months before our story begins they had taken unfurnished apartments in a little house in West Hampstead, for which they paid fifteen shillings a week. These consisted of a nice little sitting-room, a moderate-sized bedroom for the sisters and a small one for Marion, and a little room on the floor above the sitting-room, which had been fitted up as a kitchen, and the glories of which we will reveal later. They all made their own beds, and dusted their rooms before breakfast. On alternate weeks they took it in turns to get up half an hour earlier, dust the sitting-room, and lay and prepare the breakfast, for which everything was put ready overnight. The breakfast generally consisted of ham, brawn, pressed beef, or something similar. If any cooking had to be done, it was something that was finished very quickly, such as fried bacon or scrambled eggs.