“Meaning that I hid it, that is, what was left of it, under a board. But that ain’t the worst. When I was asleep that devil Ellen, who’s had her share all these years, got to the board and collared the things and bolted with them, and look what she’s left me instead,” and she held up a scrap of paper, “a receipt for five years’ wages, and she’s had them over and over again. Ah, if ever I get a chance at her,” and she doubled her long hand and made a motion as of a person scratching. “She’s bolted and left me here to starve. I haven’t had a bit since yesterday, nor a drink either, and that’s worse. What’s to become of me? I’m starving. I shall have to go to the workhouse. Yes, me,” she added in a scream, “me, who have spent thousands; I shall have to go to a workhouse like a common woman!” “It’s cruel, marm, cruel,” said the sympathetic George, “and you a lawful wedded wife ‘till death do us part.’ But, marm, I saw a public over the way. Now, no offence, but you’ll let me just go over and fetch a bite and a sup.” “Well,” she answered hungrily, “you’re a gent, you are, though you’re a country one. You go, while I just make a little toilette, and as for the drink, why let it be brandy.” “Brandy it shall be,” said the gallant George, and departed. In ten minutes he returned with a supply of beef patties, and a bottle of good, strong “British Brown,” which as everybody knows is a sufficient quantity to render three privates or two blue-jackets drunk and incapable. The woman, who now presented a slightly more respectable appearance, seized the bottle, and pouring about a wine-glass and a half of its contents into a tumbler mixed it with an equal quantity of water and drank it off at a draught. “That’s better,” she said, “and now for a patty. It’s a real picnic, this is.” He handed her one, but she could not eat more than half of it, for alcohol destroys the healthier appetites, and she soon went back to the brandy bottle. “Now, marm, that you are a little more comfortable, perhaps you will tell me how as you got into this way, and you with a rich husband, as I well knows, to love and cherish you.” “A husband to love and cherish me?” she said; “why, I have written to him three times to tell him that I’m starving, and never a cent has he given me—and there’s no allowance due yet, and when there is they’ll take it, for I owe hundreds.” “Well,” said George, “I call it cruel—cruel, and he rolling in gold. Thirty thousand pounds he hev just made, that I knows on. You must be an angel, marm, to stand it, an angel without wings. If it were my husband, now I’d know the reason why.” “Ay, but I daren’t. He’d murder me. He said he would.”