These screws of sweets and quarter pounds of broken biscuits given to the children of the very poor afforded her the only pleasure Mrs. Day got out of her long hours behind the grocery counter. For, in spite of the greed and selfishness of human nature, perhaps the most keenly felt deprivations of the one who has been rich and now is poor is the inability to put the hand lightly in the pocket, and with no thought if it can be afforded or no, to give to those who ask. While Mrs. Day had been attending to her own customers with one ear, she had been hearing with the other a discussion going on at the opposite corner as to the price and the quality of the butter. "Ours is from the best dairy," young--very young!--Mr. Pretty was assuring the poor, respectable woman who was hanging back from putting his assertion to the test. "Fresh in, every day, mum. Like to put a bit on your tongue to try it?" The woman did so, tasting the morsel with an anxious look. "But I can't afford to give you one-and-two the pound, if I can buy it a penny less, only a little way down the street." "You don't get butter there like this, ma'am;" and young Mr. Pretty, who should have been Master Pretty surely, by rights, conveyed a piece of butter to his own tongue, and tasted it loudly, looking very wise. "'Best quality, one and a penny.' I see it ticketed up as I come by Coman's." She turned round to the mistress of the shop. "I have always dealt along of you for butter, ma'am," she said. "I haven't no wish to leave you, but where I buy my butter--stand to reason I must buy the rest of my grosheries." "If Coman is down to that; you shall have it for the same sum;" Mrs. Day promised. Her butter had already been "dropped" twice before, that day, in order to keep pace with the passion for underselling of the new grocer, who had, for the undoing of the widow and the orphan, opened a shop lower down the street. Our poor retailer was selling her sugars, too, for less than she gave for them. "You must do so for a time," George Boult had informed her. "Coman can't go on like this for ever. He'll get tired of the game soon--if I know anything of trade and tradesmen--then you can stick it on to your goods again." While the subject of the butter was being debated, the child Franky came in from afternoon school. He was day-boarder at a cheap academy to which other small tradesmen's sons were sent--a school very inferior to that to which Bernard had gone. Companionship with rough, common children had not improved the manners of Franky, nor his habit of speech. He dashed in, with no thought of the deference due to customers, pushed out of his way the lady just deciding to let Mrs. Day try to procure in the town a candle more to her taste, rushed round the counter to his mother. "C'n I go in to tea with Willy Spratt? Willy Spratt's ma says I may go to tea with 'm. I wish to, very much. C'n I go?" "No, my dear. We like you to have tea with us. We can't spare you."