Mrs. Grainger, the charwoman whose services were to be enlisted all the time Mr. Crawford was in the house, brought up his breakfast, and carried down news that the gentleman was arranging his papers and the rooms generally, as was only natural and to be expected upon a gentleman taking up his residence in a new lodging. Mr. Crawford she found very civil, but not inclined at all for conversation. He told Mrs. Grainger he should ring for her when he wanted her, and she took the liberty of explaining to the gentleman that he could not ring for her, because there was no bell. Upon this the gentleman said he should put his head over the balustrade and call to her, if she would be good enough to favour him with her name; which she accordingly did, giving her Christian name and married name, and adding with a view to defying fraud or personation, her maiden name (Wantage) also. The only piece of information he had volunteered to Mrs. Grainger, _née_ Wantage, was that he had no intention of stirring out that day. Layard did not renew the conversation of the night before. He was extraordinarily fond of his beautiful, sprightly, gentle-hearted sister, and he knew that his badinage had reduced her almost to tears. He was grave and tender, and devoted himself through most of breakfast to his lusty, restless, yellow-haired boy of three, little Freddie. Alfred Layard's duties lay at the works, not the office, of the great Welford Gas Company. Hence, although his functions were those of a clerk, he had not the hours of a clerk. Years ago the Layards had been in a position very different from that occupied by them now. Then their father had been a prosperous merchant in Newcastle, but a series of disasters had come upon him: a partner failed in another business, a bank broke, and the father's health gave way utterly, and he died leaving absolutely nothing behind him. Alfred was at Cambridge at the time of the crash. He left the University at once, and for some time failed to get anything to do. At length an old friend of his father's found him a situation worth a hundred and twenty pounds a year in the great Welford Gasworks. In a couple of years his salary was increased ten pounds a year, upon which joyful encouragement he married Lucy Aldridge, the penniless girl he had, before the downfall of his father's house, resolved to make his wife. For a little while he and his wife and sister lived very happily and contentedly on his modest hundred and thirty pounds a year. Then came little Freddie, and although it was an additional mouth to feed, any one of the three would have been without meat and butter from year's end to year's end rather than without baby Freddie. And when Freddie was a year old and could just syllable his mother's name, the ears of the poor young well-beloved mother were closed for ever in this life to the voice of her only sweetheart, Alfred, and her only child.