She was cutting slices of bread for him to toast. Unused to hard fare, the children could not eat dry bread with any relish: so, when there was neither butter nor dripping, neither treacle nor honey in the house, Edina had the bread toasted. Alfred knelt down before the fire--the only fire they had--and began to toast. The kettle was singing on the hob. Edina turned the milk into a jug. They were sitting down to the tea-table when Charles came in. A glance at his weary and dispirited face told Edina that he had met with no more luck to-day than usual. Putting down a brown-paper parcel that he carried, containing a fresh supply of material to be made into nets, he took his place at the table. How hungry he was, no one but himself knew. And how scanty the food was that he could be supplied with! But for his later experience, Charles could not have believed that it was so difficult for a young man to obtain a situation in London. Edina, less hopeful than he, would not have believed it. Charles Raynor had not been brought up to work of any sort, had never done any; and this seemed to be one of the stumbling-blocks in his way. Perhaps he looked too much of a gentleman; perhaps his refined manners and tones told against him in the eyes of men of business, betraying that he might prove unfit for work: at any rate, he had not found any one to take him. Another impediment was that no sooner did a situation fall vacant, than a large number of applicants made a rush to fill it. Only one of them could be engaged: and it never happened to be Charles. Charles looked through the _Times_ advertisements every morning, through the friendliness of a neighbouring newsvendor. He would read of a clerk being wanted in some place or other in the great mart of London, and away he would go, to present himself. But he invariably found other applicants before him, and as invariably he never seemed to have the slightest chance. The disappointment was beginning to tell upon him. There were times when he felt almost maddened. His conscience had been awake these last many bitter weeks, and the prolonged strain often seemed more than he could bear. Had it been only himself! All, then, as it seemed to Charles Raynor, all would have been easy. He could enlist for a soldier; he could join the labourers' emigration society and go out for a term of years to Australia or Canada; he could turn porter at a railway-station. These wild thoughts (though perhaps they could not be called so very wild in his present circumstances) continually passed through his mind: but he had to put them aside as visionary.