CHAPTER I.
PAUL KEGWORTHY lived with his mother, Mrs.Button, his stepfather, Mr.
Button, and six little Buttons, his half brothers and sisters.

His was not an ideal home; it consisted in a bedroom, a kitchen and a scullery in a grimy little house in a grimy street made up of rows of exactly similar grimy little houses, and forming one of a hundred similar streets in a northern manufacturing town.

Mr.and Mrs.Button worked in a factory and took in as lodgers grimy single men who also worked in factories.

They were not a model couple; they were rather, in fact, the scandal of Budge Street, which did not itself enjoy, in Bludston, a reputation for holiness.

Neither was good to look upon.