Page:E Nesbit - The Literary Sense.djvu/87

Rh usual, and no one was there but the char-woman.

"An adventuress! I told you so!" said his mother at once—and the young man sat down at his study table and looked at the title of his article on " The Decadence of Criticism." It was surely a very long time ago that he had written that. And he sat there thinking, till his mother's voice roused him.

"The silver is all right, thank goodness," she said, "but your banjo girl has taken a pair of your sister's silk stockings, and those new shoes of hers with the silver buckles—and she's left these."

She held out a pair of little patent leather shoes, very worn and dusty—the slender silken web of a black stocking, brown with dust, hung from her hand. He answered nothing. She spent the rest of that day in searching the house for further losses, but all things were in their place, except the silver-handled button-hook—and that, as even his sister owned, had been missing for months.

Yet his family would never leave him to keep house alone again: they said he is not to be