Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt: ... looking and smiling at him--a stout and a dowdy woman. Cheaply and flashily dressed in faded finery--not the sort of woman whose recognition one would be over-anxious to compel. Mr. Gibbs looked at her. There was something in her face and in her voice which struck faintly some forgotten chord in his memory. "Tom! don't you know me? I am Nelly." He looked at her intently for some instants. Then it all flashed over him. This was Nelly, the real Nelly, the Nelly of his younger days, the Nelly he had come to find. This dandy sloven, whose shrill voice proclaimed her little vulgar soul--so different from that other Nelly, whose soft, musical tones had not been among the least of her charms. The recognition came on him with the force of a sudden shock. He reeled, so that he had to clutch at a railing to help him stand. "Tom! what's the matter? Aren't you well? Or is it the joy of seeing me has sent you silly?" She laughed, the dissonant laughter of the female Cockney of a certain class. Mr. Gibbs recovered his balance and his civility. "Thank you, I am very well. And you?" "Oh, I'm all right. There's never much the matter with me. I can't afford the time to be ill." She laughed again. "Well, this is a start my meeting you. Come and have a bit o' dinner along with us." "Who is us? Your father and your mother?" "Why, father, he's been dead these five years, and mother, she's been dead these three. I don't want you to have a bit of dinner along with them--not hardly." Again she laughed. "It's my old man I mean. Why, you don't mean to say you don't know I'm married! Why, I'm the mother of five." He had fallen in at her side. They were walking on together--he like a man in a dream. "We're doing pretty well considering, we manage to live, you know." She laughed again. She seemed filled with laughter, which was more than Mr. Gibbs was then. "We're fishmongers, that's...
