"Now come, sir," she said, "let us talk comfortable: you won't mind giving me your opinion, I dare say. I have looked out for an opportunity to ask it: you being what you are, sir, and his good friend. Them two--they don't hit it off well together, do they?" Knowing she must allude to Bevere and his wife, I had no ready answer at hand. Mrs. Dyke took silence for assent. "Ah, I see how it is. I thought I must be right; I've thought it for some time. But Lizzie only laughs in my face, when I ask her. There's no happiness between 'em; just the other thing; I told Lizzie so only yesterday. But they can't undo what they have done, and there's nothing left for them, sir, but to make the best of it." "That's true, Mrs. Dyke. And I think Lizzie might do more towards it than she does. If she would only----" "Only try to get a bit into his ways and manners and not offend him with hers," put in discerning Mrs. Dyke, when I hesitated, "He is as nice a young gentleman as ever lived, and I believe has the making in him of a good husband. But Lizzie is vulgar and her ways are vulgar; and instead of checking herself and remembering that he is just the opposite, and that naturally it must offend him, she lets herself grow more so day by day. I know what's what, sir, having been used to the ways of gentry when I was a young woman, for I lived cook for some years in a good family." "Lizzie's ways are so noisy." "Her ways are noisy and rampagious," assented Mrs. Dyke, "more particularly when she has been at her drops; and noise puts out a sick man." "Her drops!" I repeated, involuntarily, the word calling up a latent doubt that lay in my mind. "When girls that have been in busy employment all day and every day, suddenly settle down to idleness, they sometimes slip into this habit or that habit, not altogether good for themselves, which they might never else have had time to think of," remarked Mrs. Dyke. "I've come in here more than once lately and seen Lizzie drinking hot spirits-and-water in the daytime: I know you must have seen the same, sir, or I'd not mention it--and beer she'll take unlimited." Of course I had seen it. "I think she must have learnt it at the counter; drinking never was in our family, and I never knew that it was in her father's," continued Mrs. Dyke. "But some of the young women, serving at these bars, get to like the drink through having the sight and smell of it about 'em all day long." That was more than likely, but I did not say so, not caring to continue that branch of the subject. "The marriage was a misfortune, Mrs. Dyke."