"Daniel Froud," she said, when she had sufficiently recovered her breath, "the next time you do that I shall give you notice." With which dreadful threat, she gathered herself together, and hobbled back to her own quarter of the dingy house, leaving Mr. Froud to bemoan the absurdly easy terms he had made with "the Golden Shoemaker." "If I had only known!" he moaned; "if I had only known!" That evening "Cobbler" Horn told his sister what he had done, and why he had done it; and she held up her hands in dismay. "First," she said, "I don't see why you should have bought the house at all; and, secondly, you have paid far more for it than it is worth." CHAPTER XIII. FREE COBBLERY. "I suppose you'll be looking out for a tenant for this house, when you've found somewhere for us to go?" queried Miss Jemima, at breakfast the next morning. "Well, no," replied her brother, "I think not." "Why," cried Miss Jemima, "I hope we are not to go on living in this poky little place!" "No, that is not exactly my intention, either," said "Cobbler" Horn. "We must, I suppose, remove to another house. But I wish this one to remain very much as it is; I shall want to use it sometimes." "Want to use it sometimes!" echoed Miss Jemima, in a mystified tone. "Yes; you see I don't feel that I can give up my lifelong employment all at once. So I've been thinking that I'll come to the old workshop, now and then, and do a bit of cobbling just for a change." Here he paused, and moved uneasily in his chair. "It wouldn't do to charge anything for my work now, of course," he continued; "so I've made up my mind to do little bits of jobs, now and again, without any pay, for some of the poor people round about, just for the sake of old times, you know." Miss Jemima's hands went up with their accustomed movement of dismay. "Why, that will never do," she cried. "You'll have all the thriftless loons in the town bringing you their boots and shoes to mend." "I must guard against that," was the quiet reply. "Well," continued Miss Jemima, in an aggrieved tone, "I altogether disapprove of your continuing to work as if you were a poor man. But you ought, at least, to make a small charge. Otherwise you will be imposed upon all round." Finding, however, that she could not move her brother from his purpose, Miss Jemima relinquished the attempt. "Well, Thomas," she concluded, "you can never have been intended for this world and its ways. There is probably a vacancy in some quite different one which you ought to have filled."