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194 anxiety and helplessness before Mrs. Talboys and Emmie who lost no time in putting on their bonnets and returning to Essex Street, after thanking us most emphatically for our kindness and hospitality. She sincerely hoped that we would kindly call on her from time to time; Emmie and she were always at home in the evening, and they would be most happy if, when we had an evening to spare, we would spend it with them.

By degrees Maxwell and I became very intimate with Mrs. Talboys, and we took an interest in assisting her with our counsel, whenever she found herself entangled in a social difficulty with which she was unable to grapple single-handed. For I am afraid that no course of training under the sun could possibly have made a good manager of Mrs. Talboys. She was a mild, weak, good-hearted, unsystematic woman, who was as unfit to manage a London lodging-house as Maxwell and I were to command a man-of-war. A very short experience of the nature of the difficulties with which the poor lady was surrounded, convinced us that she was more or less the dupe of everyone with whom she had dealings. We contrived, in course of time, to establish a system of check upon her lodgers and her tradespeople, we lent her a little money to make a few indispensable additions to her stock of furniture, and we procured her a tenant for her drawing-room floor. In a couple of months after Captain Talboys' departure, matters had so far improved that Mrs. Talboys was in a position to substitute a permanent cook for the intermittent functionary who had hitherto been in the habit of looking in from