Before Justina had been many weeks at the Albert Theatre, it became an established fact that Mr. Clissold was to drink tea with Miss Elgood every afternoon. The gentle temptations of the kettledrum, which he had resisted so bravely in Eton Square, beguiled him here in Bloomsbury, though the simple feast was held on a second floor, with a French mechanic working sedulously at his trade below. Many an hour did Maurice Clissold waste in careless happy talk in that second-floor sitting-room, with its odour of stale tobacco, its shabby old-fashioned furniture, its all-pervading air of poverty and commonness. The room was glorified for him somehow, as he sat by the sunny window sipping an infusion of congou and pekoe out of a blue delft teacup. One day it struck him suddenly that Justina ought to have prettier teacups, and a few days afterwards there arrived a set of curious old dragon-china cups and saucers. He had not gone to a china-shop, like a rich man, and ordered the newest and choicest ware that Minton’s factory had produced. But he had walked half over London, and peered into all manner of obscure dens in the broker’s shop line, till he found something to please him. Old red and blue sprawling monsters of the crocodile species, on thinnest opalescent porcelain, cups and saucers that had been hoarded and cherished by ancient housekeepers, only surrendered when all that life can cling to slipped from death’s dull hand. The old fragile pottery pleased him beyond measure, and he carried the cups and saucers off to a cab, packed in a basket of paper shavings, and took them himself to Justina. ‘I don’t suppose they are worth very much now-a-days when Oriental china is at a discount,’ he said, ‘and they cost me the merest trifle. But I thought you’d like them.’ Justina was enraptured. Those old cups and saucers were the first present she had ever received—the first actual gift bestowed out of regard for her pleasure which she could count in all her life; except the same donor’s offerings of books and music. ‘How good of you!’ she said, more than once, and with a look worth three times as many words. Maurice laughed at her delight. ‘It was worth my perambulation of London to see you so pleased,’ he said. ‘What, did you take so much trouble to get them?’ ‘I walked a good long way. The only merit my offering has is that I took some pains to find it. I am not a rich man, you know, Justina.’ He called her by her Christian name always, with a certain brotherly freedom that was not unpleasant to either. ‘I am so glad of that,’ she exclaimed, naïvely. ‘Glad I’m not rich? Why, that’s scarcely friendly, Justina.’ ‘Isn’t it? But if you were rich you wouldn’t come to see us so often, perhaps. Rich people have such hosts of friends.’