Her baby grew heavy in her arms, and the vagrant, a bundle of rags thrown forward in a heap, slept at the other end of the bench. But she could not sleep, and the moon whirled on her miserable way. Then the glassy stillness was broken by the measured tramp of the policeman going his rounds. He directed her to Lambeth Workhouse, and as she walked towards Westminster she heard him rousing the vagrant and bidding him move onward. XX Those who came to the workhouse for servants never offered more than fourteen pounds a year, and these wages would not pay for her baby's keep out at nurse. Her friend the matron did all she could, but it was always fourteen pounds. "We cannot afford more." At last an offer of sixteen pounds a year came from a tradesman in Chelsea; and the matron introduced Esther to Mrs. Lewis, a lonely widowed woman, who for five shillings a week would undertake to look after the child. This would leave Esther three pounds a year for dress; three pounds a year for herself. What luck! The shop was advantageously placed at a street corner. Twelve feet of fronting on the King's Road, and more than half that amount on the side street, exposed to every view wall papers and stained glass designs. The dwelling-house was over the shop; the shop entrance faced the kerb in the King's Road. The Bingleys were Dissenters. They were ugly, and exacted the uttermost farthing from their customers and their workpeople. Mrs. Bingley was a tall, gaunt woman, with little grey ringlets on either side of her face. She spoke in a sour, resolute voice, when she came down in a wrapper to superintend the cooking. On Sundays she wore a black satin, fastened with a cameo brooch, and round her neck a long gold chain. Then her manners were lofty, and when her husband called "Mother," she answered testily, "Don't keep on mothering me." She frequently stopped him to settle his necktie or collar. All the week he wore the same short jacket; on Sundays he appeared in an ill-fitting frock-coat. His long upper lip was clean shaven, but under his chin there grew a ring of discoloured hair, neither brown nor red, but the neutral tint that hair which does not turn grey acquires. When he spoke he opened his mouth wide, and seemed quite unashamed of the empty spaces and the three or four yellow fangs that remained. John, the elder of the two brothers, was a silent youth whose one passion seemed to be eavesdropping. He hung round doors in the hopes of overhearing his sisters' conversation and if he heard Esther and the little girl who helped Esther in her work talking in the kitchen, he would steal cautiously halfway down the stairs. Esther often thought that his young woman must be sadly in want of a sweetheart to take on with one such as he. "Come along, Amy," he would cry, passing out before her; and not even at the end of a long walk did he offer her his arm; and they came strolling home just like boy and girl.