"Charlotte, it is not a bit of use your talking," broke in Mary Ann Cross vehemently. "We shall go to the party, and we shall buy new things for it. Bankes's have some lovely sarcenets, cross-barred; green, and pink, and lilac; and me and 'Melia mean to have a dress apiece off 'em. With a pink bow in front, and a white collar--my! wouldn't folks stare at us!--Twelve yards each it would take, and they are one-and-eightpence a yard." "Mary Ann, it would be just madness! There'd be the making, the lining, and the ribbon: five or six-and-twenty shillings each, they would cost you. Pray don't!" "How you do reckon things up, Charlotte! We should pay off weekly: we have time afore us." "What would your father say?" "Charlotte, just hold your noise about father," quickly returned Amelia Cross, in a hushed and altered tone. "You know we don't tell him about Bankes's." Charlotte found she might as well have talked to the winds. The girls were bent upon the evening's pleasure, and also upon the smart things they deemed necessary for it. A few minutes more and they left her; and trooped down to the shop of the Messrs. Bankes. Charlotte was coming home that evening from an errand to the town, when she met Adam Thorneycroft. He was somewhat above the common run of workmen. "Oh, is it you, Charlotte?" he exclaimed, stopping her. "I say, how is it that you'll never have anything to say to me now?" "I have told you why, Adam," she replied. "You have told me a pack of nonsense. I wouldn't lose you, Charlotte, to be made king of England. When once we are married, you shall see how steady I'll be. I will not enter a public-house." "You have been saying that you will not for these twelve months past, Adam," she sadly rejoined; and, had her face been visible in the dark night, he would have seen that it was working with agitation. "What does it hurt a man, to go out and take a quiet pipe and a glass after his work's over? Everybody does it." "Everybody does not. But I do not wish to contend. It seems to bring you no conviction. Half the miseries around us in Honey Fair arise from so much of the wages being wasted at the public-houses. I know what you would say--that the wives are in fault as well. So they are. I do not believe people were sent into the world to live as so many of us live: nothing but scuffle and discomfort, and--I may almost say it--sinfulness. One of these wretched households shall never be mine." "My goodness, Charlotte! How seriously you speak!" "It is a serious subject. I want to try to live so as to do my duty by myself and by those around me; to pass my days in peace with the world and with my conscience. A woman beaten down, cowed by all sorts of ills, could not do so; and, where the husband is unsteady, she must be beaten down. Adam, you know it is not with a willing heart I give you up, but I am forced to it." "How can you bring yourself to say this to me?" he rejoined.