One asset had been overlooked until that interview, the homestead at Gilead, Brooke’s own property, asked for in a moment of sentiment and freely given her. Mr. Dean, knowing the place and location well, thought that, with good management, it might be sold at the right season for perhaps six or eight thousand dollars. All these circumstances were pushed into Brooke’s brain, jostling and crowding each other until it seemed hopeless to think. Even Lucy Dean, huffed because Brooke would not come to her for the rest of the winter or borrow money of her father to establish a little apartment where she could work at her painting, though she came as regularly as ever, had ceased to question or even offer cheer. And it seemed almost impossible for Brooke to tell her mother, in the face of hope, that Mr. Dean’s plan of sending Adam Lawton to the sanatorium in the country seemed the only feasible solution at the present moment. As for her mother and herself, she would work for both, but not in anything obtained merely by the insecure path of social influence. It would be teaching drawing, of course, for too well she realized Lorenz’ words that as a painter of pictures she had not yet “awakened,” and in the world of competition the winners of a single prize or the acclaim won in charity bazaars is a damning introduction. * * * * * The entrance of some one brought Brooke to herself, a shrill voice that replied in a high key to the answer of the maid, “In the den? Then we’ll go right in very informally, no need to take the cards,” and Mrs. Ashton, followed by a married daughter, entered quite abruptly, the elder lady looking at the two women with something akin to disapproval on her florid face, an expression that Brooke interpreted instantly. Mrs. Ashton was becoming bored at the situation and had a feeling of resentment that all her opportunities of becoming the patroness of the Lawtons were vanishing. She still had one more card to play, a trump she considered it, and she suddenly drew it from the pack and cast it before Mrs. Lawton. A widower, more than passing rich, though not of her precise set, with two daughters just leaving school, had intrusted her to find a well-bred New Yorker as chaperon and companion to travel with them until the next autumn, and then launch them tactfully in the Whirlpool. Any reasonable salary might be demanded—would dear Pamela like the chance? Six or eight months abroad would doubtless restore her tone and spirits. Brooke’s eyes flashed fire, Scotch fire not easily put out when once it was kindled; but Mrs. Lawton only grew a shade more pale, and said in her soft, slow accent, looking steadily at her friend, “Susan, you are forgetting Adam. How could I both go abroad and give him the care he will always need while he lives?”