_I have no interest in my son's daughter. At the same time, I am not anxious to be under an obligation to strangers for her maintenance. If you insist on giving up your care of the baby, I must find some other worthy couple to look after her. If, on the other hand, you are willing to accept that responsibility and will let me hear that you are prepared to do so, I will instruct my lawyers, Messrs. Hepper and Philcox, to remit you the sum of £100 a year in quarterly instalments payable in advance until she reaches the age of ten years, when I shall communicate fresh proposals._ _Yours truly, Richard Flower._ Thus it befell that Mary continued to live with Mr. and Mrs. Fawcus, calling them Uncle William and Aunt Lucy, and indirectly being the cause of Mrs. Fawcus's getting nearer to an intimate mode of addressing her husband than she had ever reached before. The contract into which Mr. Fawcus had entered with Messrs. Holland and Brown might have been less grandly described as an engagement to be caretaker of their premises, for which he was paid the sum of eighteen shillings a week and allotted the basement of kitchen, scullery, two rooms, a cellar, and a backyard. "The task is in some respects a menial task," he told his wife. "But it is redeemed by the fact that I am a warden of books. Had I been invited to guard bales of dry goods, I should have declined the offer. I am ready in the cause of literature and learning to sacrifice what remains to me of scholastic dignity by exposing myself in the _toga virilis_ of service, in other words, a green baize apron, punctually at 6.30 a.m. to the public eye, and if the public eye chooses to regard my daily renovation of the brass, my _quotidian lustration_ of the steps, as menial, I merely say with what's his _nomen_ '_per aspera ad astra_.'" "Well, all I beg is, Mr. Fawcus"--he had not become Uncle William yet--"all I beg is," said his wife, "you won't go preaching about St. Paul's Churchyard of a Sunday morning." "In, my love, not about. On, my dear, not of. Your allusion was to the locality and date, not the subject of my discourse." "Don't be so pernickety, Mr. Fawcus. You know quite well what I meant to say." "The Queen's English, my dear, should share with the Queen's Person the privilege of inviolability. But set your mind at rest. Preserve the _mens sana in corpore sano_. Now that we have been intrusted with the nonage of that cherub," he pointed to Mary asleep in her cot, "I do not intend to jeopardize the material comforts of this basement. _Tu Marcellus eris!_ In other words, I intend to devote all my persuasive energy to Mary." Mr. Fawcus kept his word. To be sure, he might say to his wife: