`Like it? No! I never liked the thing. But she fixed it all up to have it done, like.'

He returned to pulling off his boots.

`If you don't like it, why do you keep it hanging there? Perhaps your wife would like to have it,' she said.

He looked up at her with a sudden grin.

`She carted off iverything as was worth taking from th' 'ouse,' he said. `But she left that!'

`Then why do you keep it? for sentimental reasons?'

`Nay, I niver look at it. I hardly knowed it wor theer. It's bin theer sin' we come to this place.'

`Why don't you burn it?' she said.

He twisted round again and looked at the enlarged photograph. It was framed in a brown-and-gilt frame, hideous. It showed a clean-shaven, alert, very young-looking man in a rather high collar, and a somewhat plump, bold young woman with hair fluffed out and crimped, and wearing a dark satin blouse.

`It wouldn't be a bad idea, would it?' he said.

He had pulled off his boots, and put on a pair of slippers. He stood up on the chair, and lifted down the photograph. It left a big pale place on the greenish wall-paper.

`No use dusting it now,' he said, setting the thing against the wall.

He went to the scullery, and returned with hammer and pincers. Sitting where he had sat before, he started to tear off the back-paper from the big frame, and to pull out the sprigs that held the backboard in position, working with the immediate quiet absorption that was characteristic of him.

He soon had the nails out: then he pulled out the backboards, then the enlargement itself, in its solid white mount. He looked at the photograph with amusement.

`Shows me for what I was, a young curate, and her for what she was, a bully,' he said. `The prig and the bully!'

`Let me look!' said Connie.

He did look indeed very clean-shaven and very clean altogether, one of the clean young men of twenty years ago. But even in the photograph his eyes were alert and dauntless. And the woman was not altogether a bully, though her jowl was heavy. There was a touch of appeal in her.

`One never should keep these things,' said Connie. `That one shouldn't! One should never have them made!'

He broke the cardboard photograph and mount over his knee, and when it was small enough, put it on the fire.

`It'll spoil the fire though,' he said.

The glass and the backboard he carefully took upstairs.

The frame he knocked asunder with a few blows of the hammer, making the stucco fly. Then he took the pieces into the scullery.

`We'll burn that tomorrow,' he said. `There's too much plaster-moulding on it.'