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Rosina shook her head.

"Not to-night, Mrs. Heath," she confessed.

Mrs. Heath took a gloomy view of the situation.

"I likes my lodgers," she announced, "to be in regular work—so much a week coming in for certain—and then we all knows where we are. But putting that aside, miss, may I ask if you and the young gentleman were thinking of living on here alone together like?"

"Of course," Rosina answered, with wide-open eyes. "Mr. Garner has just told you that he is going."

Mrs. Heath's cough appeared to become more troublesome.

"Without wishing to make myself in any way unpleasant," she said, "I simply puts it to you that you can't have the rooms. Mine's a respectable lodging house, and always has been."

Rosina was genuinely bewildered.

"But whatever do you mean, Mrs. Heath?" she exclaimed. "We are perfectly respectable people. We can get references, if you like."

"It isn't a matter of references," was the dogged reply. "I don't wish to make insinuations, being an honest and a careful woman myself, but I just tell you both that I can't let the rooms to a young man and young woman who aren't married, and, so far as I know, aren't thinking of it."