The stairs give onto a passage with doors leading off from the right, and the passage terminates in a door which Essie butts open with her knee, and here is a bedroom. "This is the lodger's room," says Essie, setting down the candle and then removing the jug from the basin and pouring out the water. "Course it don't look much jus' at present, not expecting you, you see. But I'll pop up after supper an' put it to rights. Find your way down, can't you? I'll get you a bit of soap out of my room to go on with." There is a second door to the bedroom, and Essie goes through it and returns with soap. "That's my room," says Essie. "I call this my dressing-room when we haven't got a lodger, jus' like as if I was a duchess," and she gives the bright laugh that Mr. Wriford had heard in the shop. "That's all right then. Bring the candle. That mark on the wall there's where a lodger left his candle burning all night. Oh, they're cautions, some of our lodgers! Don't be long." IV Most savoury and most welcome soup opens the supper. After it a shoulder of mutton, Essie doing all the helping and the carving and the running about. She sits opposite Mr. Wriford. Her eyes--there is something quite extraordinarily bright about her eyes as he watches them. They are never still. They are for ever sparkling from this object to that; and wherever momentarily they rest he sees them sparkle anew and sees her soft lips twitch as though from where her eyes alight a hundred merry fancies run sparkling to her mind. Her eyes flicker over the dish of potatoes and rest there a moment, and there they are sparkling, and her mouth twitching, as though she is recalling comic passages in buying them or in cooking them, or perhaps it is their very appearance, grotesquely fat and helpless, heaped one upon the other, in which she sees something odd that tickles her. Most extraordinarily bright eyes, and with them always most funny little compressions of her lips, as if she is for ever tickled onto the very brink of breaking into laughter. This at last, indeed, she does. Presence of the new lodger seems to throw a constraint about the table, and the meal is eaten almost to the end of the mutton course in complete silence. Very startling, therefore, when Essie suddenly drops her knife and fork with a clatter and leans back in her chair, eyes all agleam. "Oh, dear me!" cries Essie, as Mr. and Mrs. Bickers stare at her. "Oh, dear me! I'm very sorry, but just munching like this, you know, all of us, without speaking a word! Oh, dear!" and she uses the expression that Mr. Wriford had heard when he first spoke to Mrs. Bickers. "Oh, dear, let's have a laugh!"