The expenses of scenery, properties, and posting were gone into, and while listening to the different estimates Kate looked at her husband vaguely, and plunged in a sort of painful wonderment, asking herself how standing on the brink of ruin he could calmly make plans for the future. But to the actor, whose life had never run for a year without getting entangled in some difficult knot or other, the present hitch did not give the slightest uneasiness. A strange town to face and half a crown in his pocket might cause him some temporary embarrassment, but a hundred pounds at the bank, and the notoriety of having been for two years the manager of a travelling company, was to Dick an exceptionally brilliant start in life, and it did not occur to him to doubt that he would hop into another shop as good as the one he had left. But as the woman had been engaged in none of these anxious battles for existence, the news of a threatened break-up of her world fell with a cruel shock upon her, and she experienced in an aggravated form the same dull nervous terror from which she had suffered in the early days when she had first joined the company, but then the full tide of love and prosperity bore their bark along, and quieted her fears. But now in the first puff of the first squall she saw herself like one wrecked and floating on a spar in a wide and unknown sea of trouble. Sitting on the bed where she would never sleep again, she watched Dick counting on his fingers and looking dreamily into the spaces of some impossible future, and asked herself what was to become of them. For the twentieth time since she had donned them the robes of the Bohemian fell from her, and she became again in instincts and tastes a middle-class woman longing for a home, a fixed and tangible fireside where she might sit in the evening by her husband's side, mending his shirts, after the work of the day. A bitter detestation of her wandering life rose to her head, and she longed to beg of her husband to give up theatricals, and try to find some other employment; and the next day it appeared to her more than usually sinful to drive to the station as the church bells were chiming, spending the hours, that should have been passed in praying, in playing 'nap,' smoking cigarettes, and talking of wigs, make-ups, choruses, and such-like. But apparently there was no help for it, and on Monday night, in her excitement, increased by the arrival of Mr. Cox, she could not help getting out of bed to beseech God to be merciful to them; her husband's heavy breathing often interrupted her, but it told her that he was her husband, and that was her only consolation.