"Why, you see, Martha," replied Phil, gazing through the smoke of his pipe with a sinister smile, "it makes a feller feel koorious to hear the partiklers about a lady wot _must_ have things, an' won't take no denial! If I was you, now, I'd disappoint her, an' see how she'd take it." He wound up his remark, which was made in a bantering tone, with another malediction, which was earnest enough--savagely so. "Oh! Phil," cried the girl, in an earnest tone of entreaty; "don't, oh, don't swear so. It is awful to think that God hears you, is near you-- at your very elbow--while you thus insult Him to his face." The man made no reply, but smoked with increasing intensity, while he frowned at the empty fire-place. "Well, Martha," he said, after a prolonged silence, "I've got work at last." "Have you?" cried the girl, with a look of interest. "Yes; it ain't much to boast of, to be sure, but it pays, and, as it ties me to nothin' an' nobody, it suits my taste well. I'm wot you may call a appendage o' the fire-brigade. I hangs about the streets till I sees a fire, w'en, off I goes full split to the nearest fire-station, calls out the engine, and gits the reward for bein' first to give the alarm." "Indeed," said Martha, whose face, which had kindled up at first with pleasure, assumed a somewhat disappointed look; "I--I fear you won't make much by that, Phil?" "You don't seem to make much by that," retorted Phil, pointing with the bowl of his pipe to the dress which lay in her lap and streamed in a profusion of rich folds down to the floor. "Not much," assented Martha, with a sigh. "Well, then," continued Phil, re-lighting his pipe, and pausing occasionally in his remarks to admire the bowl, "that bein' so, you and I are much in the same fix, so if we unites our small incomes, of course that'll make 'em just double the size." "Phil," said Martha, in a lower voice, as she let her hands and the work on which they were engaged fall on her lap, "I think, now, that it will never be." "What'll never be?" demanded the man rudely, looking at the girl in surprise. "Our marriage." "What! are you going to jilt me?" "Heaven forbid," said Martha, earnestly. "But you and I are not as we once were, Phil, we differ on many points. I feel sure that our union would make us more miserable than we are." "Come, come," cried the man, half in jest and half in earnest. "This kind of thing will never do. You mustn't joke about that, old girl, else I'll have you up for breach of promise." Mr Sparks rose as he spoke, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, put it in his waistcoat pocket, and prepared to go. "Martha," he said, "I'm goin' off now to attend to my business, but I haven't made a rap yet to-day, and its hard working on a empty stomach, so I just looked in to light my pipe, and enquire if you hadn't got a shillin' about you, eh!" The girl looked troubled.