intensity and distinctness, and her face, shoulders, hands, and figure in general, being a blurred mass of unimportant detail lost in haze and obscurity. 

 He hesitated no longer, but tapped at the door and entered. The young woman turned at the crunch of his boots on the sanded floor, and exclaiming, “Oh, Mr. Percombe, how you frightened me!” quite lost her color for a moment. 

 He replied, “You should shut your door—then you’d hear folk open it.” 

 “I can’t,” she said; “the chimney smokes so. Mr. Percombe, you look as unnatural out of your shop as a canary in a thorn-hedge. Surely you have not come out here on my account—for—” 

 “Yes—to have your answer about this.” He touched her head with his cane, and she winced. “Do you agree?” he continued. “It is necessary that I should know at once, as the lady is soon going away, and it takes time to make up.” 

 “Don’t press me—it worries me. I was in hopes you had thought no more of it. I can not part with it—so there!” 

 “Now, look here, Marty,” said the barber, sitting down on the coffin-stool table. “How much do you get for making these spars?” 

 “Hush—father’s up-stairs awake, and he don’t know that I am doing his work.” 

 “Well, now tell me,” said the man, more softly. “How much do you get?” 

 “Eighteenpence a thousand,” she said, reluctantly. 

 “Who are you making them for?” 

 “Mr. Melbury, the timber-dealer, just below here.” 

 “And how many can you make in a day?” 

 “In a day and half the night, three bundles—that’s a thousand and a half.” 

 “Two and threepence.” The barber paused. “Well, look here,” he continued, with the remains of a calculation in his tone, which calculation had been the reduction to figures of the probable monetary magnetism necessary to overpower the resistant force of her present purse and the woman’s love of comeliness, “here’s a sovereign—a gold sovereign, almost new.” He held it out between his finger and thumb. “That’s as much as you’d earn in a week and a half at that rough man’s work, and 

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