But the Windsor arm-chair was gone. Gone, like the dream of the happy little home; gone, as Tom had gone, out of her life. Its place was filled by an inexpensive plush-covered parlour suite, suitable to the little villa where the wearer of that jewelled ring should take up her abode, but Pattie turned from it petulantly. "Cheap and nasty!" she said. Now it so happened that on this afternoon, when Jane Adams came to hang out the last of her washing, she found herself short of pegs. At another time she would have managed with pins or hung the clothes in bunches, but all day the craving for beer had been growing upon her, and she determined to go out and buy pegs and have a drink. Through force of circumstances she had not tasted a drop since Saturday at dinner-time. Three whole days without a glass of beer! There had been none at her father's home, of course. The old people had been abstainers since she and Tom were babies, and she had not cared to acknowledge to them that she "took a drop now and again." It had been too late when she and Jim reached home last night to fetch any, and she had hurried to her work this morning, and, indeed, had not thought of getting a glass on her way, so full was her mind of Pattie. But now she meant to have a glass, and pegs she _must_ have! So having told her lady--about the pegs--she put on her bonnet and hurried out. She soon found a grocer's and bought her pegs, and then she turned in to the nearest public-house. Not one glass, nor two, nor three, were sufficient to allay her longing, and the housekeeping money went without a thought; it was only the remembrance of the fleeting time which stayed her. She did not wish her lady to wonder where she was. When she pushed open the public-house door and emerged into the street again, she was not completely mistress of herself, but just in the state when she would be very affable or very quarrelsome, as circumstances should seem to point. And as she put her foot upon the threshold, Pattie, wheeling little Maud, and with her heart full of Tom, came along the pavement. Now Pattie was a staunch little abstainer; all the more staunch because of her childhood's memories. Memories of nights when, piteous and shivering, she had waited outside a public-house door, to lead home her poor sorrowful mother, bound indeed by Satan these many years, by the chain of strong drink. Memories of days when on bended knee she had pleaded with that mother to give up the drink, and had been answered by a shake of the head, and a murmured, "I can't, child, I can't! I would if I could." And Pattie had known of no remedy, no saving power, till she knew Tom, and Tom had said, "Pray for her, my girl. Christ can save her!" So Pattie had prayed, not understanding how help could come, but because Tom believed in it, and, strange answer as it seemed, an illness had fallen upon her mother and she had been taken away to the Workhouse Infirmary.