It was nine o’clock. Jane Mitchell, the postman’s sister, who acted as their daily servant, came in to say she was going home till the morning. Aunt Anne followed her, as she always did, to see that the outer door was made fast. She looked out at the night for a moment, with a haunting feeling of mistrust—of what, she did not know—and listened to the silence. Not a sound—not even a footstep passing along the road. The fir-trees stood up, dark and straight, like voiceless sentinels. She looked at the stars and thought how far they were away. They gave her a sense of helplessness. She was almost afraid of the soft patter of her own feet as she went back to the drawing-room. She winked nervously, and looked quickly and suspiciously round, then sat down uneasily before the fire and watched Alfred Wimple. She knew that again and again his eyes were fixed upon her, though his lips said no word. “Are you sleepy, my love?” she asked. “I am very tired, Anne; good-night”—and, taking up a candlestick, he went slowly upstairs while she stayed below, looking at the deadening fire, knowing that one night, suddenly, everything would be changed; but how and when it would be changed she could not guess. She did not dare look forward a single day or hour. She extinguished the lamp and shut the drawing-room door and locked it, remembering for a moment the unknown people, in the bygone years, who had gone out of the room never to enter it more. Gradually the money in their possession was coming to a sure and certain end. She knew it, and her recklessness and extravagance vanished. She guarded every penny as if it were her heart’s blood, though she still did her spending with an air of willingness that concealed her reluctance. Hour after hour she racked her brains to think of some new source of help; but no suggestion presented itself, and he and she together faced, in silence, the bankruptcy that was overtaking them. He went less often towards the station now; he stayed discontentedly in the drawing-room, sitting uneasily by the fire on one of the easy-chairs with the peacock screen beside it. Sometimes, after he had brooded for a while in silence, he would get up and write a letter, but he always carefully gave it himself to the postman, and no letters at all ever arrived for him to Aunt Anne’s knowledge. “Alfred,” she asked one day, “what has become of your work in town?—the work you used to go to your chambers to do?” “I am resting now, and do not wish to be questioned about it. I require rest,” he said: and that was all.