the days passed it was also noticeable that much of her vitality had
gone too. She left herself in Henrietta's young hands and she, casting
about for a way of earning her living, found good fortune in the
terrible basement kitchen where Mrs. Banks moved mournfully and had
her disconsolate being. The gas was always lighted in that cavernous
kitchen, but it remained dark, mercifully leaving the dirt half
unseen. A joint of mutton, cold and mangled, was discernible, however,
when Henrietta descended to put her impecunious case before the
landlady and, gazing at it, the girl saw also her opportunity. Mrs.
Banks had no culinary imagination, but Henrietta found it rising in
herself to an inspired degree and there and then she offered herself
as cook in return for board and lodging for her mother and herself.

'I'm sure I'll be glad to keep you,' Mrs. Banks said: 'you give the
place a tone, you do really, you and your dear Ma sitting in the
drawing-room sewing of an evening; but it isn't only the cooking,
though I do get to hate the sight of food. I get a regular grudge
against it. But it's that butcher! Ready money or no meat's his motto,
and how to make this mutton last--' She picked it up by the bone and
cast it down again.

'Oh, I can manage butchers,' Henrietta said. 'Besides, we'll pay our
way. You'll see. Leave the cooking to me.'

'I will, gladly,' Mrs. Banks said, wiping away a tear. 'Ever since
Banks took it into his head to jump into the river, it seems like as
if I hadn't any spirit, and that Jenkins turns up his ugly nose every
time I put the mutton on the table--when he doesn't begin talking to
it like an old friend. I can't bear Jenkins, but he does pay regular,
and that's something. Well, I'll get on with the upstairs and leave