"How many runs did you make last Saturday?"

"Fifty-three, mum, and caught out."

"Then don't go talking to me about the heat. Finish that job and run
off with this filter to Mrs. Gubbins's."

Her life had not lacked variety. Married at eighteen, after a
month's courtship, to a man of whom she knew next to nothing, she
lived for a time in Liverpool, where her husband--older by ten
years--pursued various callings in the neighbourhood of the docks.
After the birth of her only child, a daughter, they migrated to
Glasgow, and struggled with great poverty for several years. This
period was closed by the sudden disappearance of Mr. Clover. He did
not actually desert his wife and child; at regular intervals letters
and money arrived from him addressed to the care of Mrs. Clover's
parents, who kept a china shop at Islington; beyond the postmarks,
which indicated constant travel in England and abroad, these letters
(always very affectionate) gave no information as to the writer's
circumstances. When Mrs. Clover had lived with her parents for about
three years she was summoned by her husband to Dulwich, where the
man had somehow established himself as a cab proprietor; he
explained his wanderings as the result of mere restlessness, and
with this cold comfort Mrs. Clover had to be content. By degrees
they settled into a not unhappy life; the girl, Minnie, was growing
up, the business might have been worse, everything seemed to promise
unbroken domestic tranquillity, when one fine day Mr. Clover was
again missing. Again he sent letters and money, the former written
in a strangely mingled mood of grief and hopefulness, the remittance
varying from half a sovereign to a ten-pound note. This time the