Mrs. Lorimer sat down at his feet on the fender-curb, her tiny hand still clinging to his.

That is to say it was planned that no vessel could proceed into a lock until the fender chain was lowered, and that an upper gate could not be opened until a lower one was closed.

"Yes," said Thurston, suddenly making the fender jump and rattle with a vicious kick.

She would make him move his chair to her side of the fire, instead of sitting opposite, and there he would remain studying every line of Mrs. Pipchin's face, while the old black cat lay coiled up on the fender purring and winking at the fire, and Paul went on studying Mrs, Pipchin and the cat and the fire, night after night, as if they were a history of necromancy in three volumes.

He envied Martin Lister the quiet jog-trot happiness of his domestic life; his love for and pride in his children; the calm haven of that comfortable hearth by which he sat to-night, with his slippered feet stretched luxuriously upon a fender-stool of his wife's manufacture, and his daughter sitting on a hassock close to his easy-chair, reading in a book of fairy tales.