“Oh, yes,” she cried. “Fine goin’s on for the likes o’ them. A harmonyum, if you please. Gawd save us! we ain’t good enough for the likes o’ ’im. A harmonyum! In Garden Court! No good can come o’ ’stravagance like that. Wot’s ’e, I’d like to know? Bah!” The woman, with a wave of her hand, expressed her contempt for such goings on and departed down the stairs with her jug. Her husband spent his spare cash at the “pub,” as a man should, and not in such vanities as a second-hand musical instrument. She had, very properly, no patience with extravagance. Marsten rapped when the playing ceased, and Joe Braunt himself came to the door. “Come in, my boy,” he said cordially, and Marsten went in. A tall girl, who might have been fourteen, or sixteen, or eighteen, rose from a chair at the harmonium. She was pale and thin, with large pathetic eyes that gave a melancholy beauty to her face. Shaking hands with her,--“How are you, Jessie?” said Marsten. “Is the cough any better?” “I think it’s always about the same,” answered the girl. “It is hard to get better in this hole,” said her father, gruffly. Braunt spoke with the accent of a Yorkshireman. He was a man who in stature and build did credit to his county, and it was “hard to believe that the slender girl was his daughter. However much Joe Braunt’s neighbours disapproved of his putting on airs and holding himself and his slim useless daughter above their betters, they took good care not to express their opinions in his hearing, for he was a rough masterful man, taciturn and gloomy, whose blow was readier than his speech; not only prompt, but effective. The whole court was afraid of him, and it acted on the principle of letting sleeping dogs lie. The woman with the jug in her hand had good cause for resentment against Joe Braunt. She had been getting her “man” home one evening from the “pub” with difficulty, and in spite of many breakings away on his part. She had succeeded in pushing and hauling him as far as the first landing, when he, overcome by a sudden realization of her unnecessary cruelty in dragging him from the brilliantly lighted public bar filled with jollity, gin, and good comradeship, to the dismal back room two flights up, with nothing but her own bitter tongue for company, clenched his fist and felled her to the floor, the back of her head striking against Braunt’s door as she went down. Braunt, pulling open his door, found the husband walking over--or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, staggering over--the prostrate body of his wife. Joe clutched the drunkard and flung him airily over the landing rail. The ill-used man rolled down the stair and out into the court, where he lay in a heap and groaned. Braunt lifted the woman and carried her up to her room. She had a dazed idea of what had happened, and at once, rather incoherently at first, began to give her rescuer her opinion of him. Who was he, she would like to know, to interfere between man and wife, great strong