This bright idea, which Jim Swain derived from his habitual reading of penny romances, devoted to the delineation of the tender passion, afforded him considerable gratification, and he had already consumed several minutes and a cold sausage while turning it over in his mind, when Harriet Routh came out of the house, and passed him, as he leaned against the wall under the archway. She was very pale and quite absorbed in thought, so that, though the lad respectfully pulled a tuft of his tousled hair in salutation, she did not perceive his presence. "She's not like the same woman," mused Mr. James Swain; "she's gone as white as anything; looks just as if she'd had to git her own livin' for ever so long, and found it precious hard to git, too. If he's jealous of her, and a ill treatin' of her, blowed if I won't peach! No, no, I won't, though, leastways not yet, 'cause I can't without lettin' out on myself too; but," said the boy with a long look which softened the cunning of his face strangely, "I would like to know as she was happier than I think she is." In the wide city of London there was not another human being to feel any such wish in connection with Harriet Routh. She was quite alone. She had so willed it, and circumstances had aided her inclination and her resolve. In the life which her husband had adopted, and she had accepted, intimacies, friendships, were impossible. The only relation between them and their kind was the relation between the swindler and his dupes, always a merely "business" connection, and generally very brief in its duration. Harriet had not a female friend in the world. Perhaps she would not have had one under any circumstances; she was not a woman to cherish sentiment; the one love of her life was an overmastering passion, which had absorbed all lesser feelings; and the secretiveness and reserve, which were large elements in her moral nature, would have been inimical to such association, which, above all, needs gushingness for its satisfactory development. Her husband's male friends saw her seldom, and were not observant or interested in the health, spirits, or appearance of any but themselves; so there was no one but the street-boy to note the change that had passed upon her. Routh, indeed, observed it, with the bitter, selfish impatience of his character, and silently resented it. But only silently; he made no comment, and Harriet, for the first time, failed to interpret his feelings.