"Do you know, I've been thinking, John, we might find room for her--those boys are a great trouble to us, and if we had a girl, it might answer better to take the papers out, and she might serve in the shop." "Serve in MY shop--good Lord!" "Some day when we could trust her, I mean--and she could sleep with Ann; and I daresay she would come for her keep in these times. And we might be saving her--God knows from what!" "Mrs. Wesden, you're as full of fancies as ever you can stick." "I've a fancy to help her in these hard times, John; and when helping her won't ruin us--us who have put by now a matter of three thou----" "Hush!" "And when helping her won't ruin us, but get rid of those plagues of boys, John. Fancy our Harriet in the streets like that!" She pointed to Mattie standing alone there, still under the gas lamp, deep in thought. Mr. Wesden looked, but his lined face was expressive of little sympathy, his wife thought. "We're hard pushed for a boy--the bill's no sooner down than up again--try a girl, John!" "If you'll get in out of the cold, Mrs. W., I'll think of it." Mrs. Wesden retired, and Mr. Wesden kept his place by the open door, and his quiet eyes on Mattie. He was a man who did nothing in a hurry, and whose actions were ruled by grave deliberation. He did not confess to his wife that of late years he had been interested in Mattie; watched her from under his papers in the shop-window; saw her business-like habits, her method, her briskness over her scanty wares, her cleverness even in dodging her _bête noire_ the policeman. He was a man, moreover, who went to church and read his Bible, and had many good thoughts beneath his occasional brusqueness and invariable immobility. A very quiet man, a man more than ordinarily cautious, hard to please, and still harder to rouse. In shutting up his shop that night, he had caught one or two fragments of the dialogue, and he knew more certainly than his wife that Mattie was being tempted back to the old life. Of that life he knew everything; he had learned it piece by piece without affecting to take an interest in the matter; he even knew that Mattie had long taken a fancy--an odd fancy--to his daughter, that she often inquired about her, and her boarding-school, of Ann Packet, domestic to the house of Wesden. He thought of Mattie's temptation, then of Mrs. Wesden's extraordinary suggestion. He was a lord of creation, and if he had a weakness it was in pooh-poohing the suggestions of his helpmate, although he adopted them in nine cases out of ten, disguising them, as he thought, by some little variation, and bringing them forward in due course as original productions of his own teeming brain.