Walking down the small flagged path outside, he flung open the iron gate which gave on to the damp pavement. But there he hesitated. The coppers in his pocket seemed to have shrunk in number, and he remembered ruefully how far Ellen could make even four pennies go. Then a boy ran up to him with a sheaf of evening papers, and Bunting, being sorely tempted—fell. “Give me a _Sun_,” he said roughly, “_Sun_ or _Echo!_” But the boy, scarcely stopping to take breath, shook his head. “Only penny papers left,” he gasped. “What’ll yer ’ave, sir?” With an eagerness which was mingled with shame, Bunting drew a penny out of his pocket and took a paper—it was the _Evening Standard_—from the boy’s hand. Then, very slowly, he shut the gate and walked back through the raw, cold air, up the flagged path, shivering yet full of eager, joyful anticipation. Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with careworn, troubled Ellen. A hot wave of unease, almost of remorse, swept over Bunting. Ellen would never have spent that penny on herself—he knew that well enough—and if it hadn’t been so cold, so foggy, so—so drizzly, he would have gone out again through the gate and stood under the street lamp to take his pleasure. He dreaded with a nervous dread the glance of Ellen’s cold, reproving light-blue eye. That glance would tell him that he had had no business to waste a penny on a paper, and that well he knew it! Suddenly the door in front of him opened, and he heard a familiar voice saying crossly, yet anxiously, “What on earth are you doing out there, Bunting? Come in—do! You’ll catch your death of cold! I don’t want to have you ill on my hands as well as everything else!” Mrs. Bunting rarely uttered so many words at once nowadays. He walked in through the front door of his cheerless house. “I went out to get a paper,” he said sullenly. After all, he was master. He had as much right to spend the money as she had; for the matter of that the money on which they were now both living had been lent, nay, pressed on him—not on Ellen—by that decent young chap, Joe Chandler. And he, Bunting, had done all he could; he had pawned everything he could pawn, while Ellen, so he resentfully noticed, still wore her wedding ring. He stepped past her heavily, and though she said nothing, he knew she grudged him his coming joy. Then, full of rage with her and contempt for himself, and giving himself the luxury of a mild, a very mild, oath—Ellen had very early made it clear she would have no swearing in her presence—he lit the hall gas full-flare. “How can we hope to get lodgers if they can’t even see the card?” he shouted angrily.