"Would you have me cry, too? No, no; I am glad he is punished." "Yes--a nice miserable lonely old age he has before him." "He has plenty of money." "You're a cold, unfeeling minx! I don't envy the man who marries you, Salvina." Salvina flushed. "I don't, either--if he were to treat me as mother has been treated." "Yes, no one has had a life like mine, since the world began," moaned Mrs. Brill, and her waning tears returned in full flood. "My poor mammy," and Salvina put a handkerchief to the flooded cheeks. "Come home, we have had enough of this." Mrs. Brill rose obediently. "Oh, yes, take her home," said Lazarus savagely, "take her to your shabby, stinking lodging, when she might have a house in Highbury New Park and three servants." "She has a house at Hackney, and I'll give her a servant, too. Come, mother." Salvina mopped up her mother's remaining tears, and with an inspiration of arrogant independence, she rang for Lazarus's servant and bade her hail a hansom cab. "If you don't want all Hackney to come and gaze at a furnished road," she said, in parting, "you'll take away that furniture yourself." Mrs. Brill bowled homeward, half consoled for everything by this charioted magnificence. Some neighbours stood by gossiping as she alighted, and then her unspoken satisfaction was complete. XII They moved into the new-old house, after Salvina had carefully ascertained that the furniture had returned to the cloud under which it had so long lived. In her resentment against its reappearance, she spent more than she could afford on the rival furniture that succeeded it, and which she now studied to make unlike it, so that quite without any touch of conscious taste, it became light, elegant, and even artistic in comparison with the old horsehair massiveness. Then began a very bad year for Salvina, even though the Damocles sword of Kitty's dismissal never fell, and Lily's migration to the Cape with Moss M. Rosenstein left Kitty still in power as companion to Mabel, to judge at least by Kitty's not seeking the parental roof, even as visitor. Mrs. Brill's happiness did not keep pace with the restored grandeurs and Salvina's own spurt of hope died down. She grew wanner than ever, going listlessly to her work and returning limp and fagged out. "You mew me up here with not a soul to speak to from morning till night," her mother burst forth one day.