though the nurses would not permit her to stay. He was no worse. But till another week, there could be no change. Then she would write that the critical day had passed--that there was still no change, and would not be again for a week; but that he was no worse. No worse!--this was the poor fare upon which General Gaunt and his wife lived in their little Swiss _pension_, where it was so cheap. They gave up even their additional candle, and economised that poor little bit of expenditure; they gave up their wine; they made none of the little excursions which had been their delight. Even with all these economies, how were they to provide the expenses which were running on--the dear London lodgings, the nurses, the boundless outgoings, which it was understood they would not grudge? Grudge! No; not all the money in the world, if it could save their George. But where--where were they to get this money? Whence was it to come? This Frances knew, but no one else. And she, too, knew that the lodgings and the nurses and the doctors were so far from being all. The poor girl spent the days much as they did, in agonised questions and considerations. If she could but get her money, her own money, whatever it was. Later, for her own use, what would it matter? She could work, she could take care of children, it did not matter what she did: but to save him, to save them. She had learned so much, however, about life and the world in which she lived, as to know that, were her object known, it would be treated as the supremest folly. Wild ideas of Jews, of finding somebody who would lend her what she wanted, as young men do in novels, rose in her mind, and were dismissed, and returned again. But she was not a young man; she was only a girl, and knew not what to do, nor where to go. Not even the very alphabet of such knowledge was hers. While this was going on, she was taken, all abstracted as she was, into Society--to the solemn heavinesses of dinner-parties; to dances even, in which her gravity and self-absorption were construed to mean very different things. Lady Markham had never said a word to any one of the idea which had sprung into her own mind full grown at sight of Sir Thomas holding in fatherly kindness her little girl’s hands. She had never said a word, oh, not a word. How such a wild and extraordinary rumour had got about, she could not imagine. But the ways of Society and its modes of information are inscrutable: a glance, a smile, are enough. And what so natural as this to bring a veil of gravity over even a _débutante_ in her first season? Lucky little girl, some people said; poor little thing, some others. No wonder she was so serious; and her mother, that successful general--her mother, that triumphant match-maker, radiant, in spite, people said, of the very uncomfortable state of affairs about Markham, and the fact that, in the absence of the executor, Nelly Winterbourn knew nothing as yet as to how she was “left.”