It was their social evening of the week, looked forward to always by his wife, spoken of cheerfully by him even last night, an evening when he might have had to bring home friends to supper, to share a tin of sardines, a fragment of mutton, Dutch cheese, and beer which he himself would have had to fetch from the nearest public-house.

He wiped his forehead and found that it was wet.
Then Ellen broke the silence.
"What I should like to know, Alfred, is--what's come to you ?" she commenced indignantly.

"Not a word have you spoken all the evening--you that there's no holding generally with your chaff and jokes.

What Mr.
and Mrs.Johnson must have thought of you, I can't imagine, standing there like a stick when they stopped to be civil for a few minutes, and behaving as though you never even heard their asking us to go in and have a bite of supper.

What have we done, eh, little Alf and me?
You look at us as though we had turned into ogres.