“You low little thing. Caught George Sampson with it! Don’t talk about catching people, miss, till your own time for catching — as you call it — comes.”

“Perhaps it has come,” muttered Lavvy, with a toss of her head.

“What did you say?” asked Bella, very sharply. “What did you say, miss?”

Lavvy declining equally to repeat or to explain, Bella gradually lapsed over her hair-dressing into a soliloquy on the miseries of being poor, as exemplified in having nothing to put on, nothing to go out in, nothing to dress by, only a nasty box to dress at instead of a commodious dressing-table, and being obliged to take in suspicious lodgers. On the last grievance as her climax, she laid great stress — and might have laid greater, had she known that if Mr Julius Handford had a twin brother upon earth, Mr John Rokesmith was the man.