“You may laugh about her shoe, Geoffrey,” she interrupted, “but you forget that even little things like that are no laughing matter now to us. The child’s shoes keep me awake at night sometimes. Defoy has not been paid for I don’t know how long. I have a mind to get her _sabots_—and as to heart——” “Well,” broke in Geoffrey, reflecting that bad as was the emotional side of the question, it was better than the commercial—“as to ‘heart?’” “You are scarcely the person to talk of it, that is all. I wonder how much of yours you gave _me_?” “Really, Honoria,” he answered, not without eagerness, and his mind filled with wonder. Was it possible that his wife had experienced some kind of “call,” and was about to concern herself with his heart one way or the other? If so it was strange, for she had never shown the slightest interest in it before. “Yes,” she went on rapidly and with gathering vehemence, “you speak about your heart”—which he had not done—“and yet you know as well as I do that if I had been a girl of no position you would never have offered me the organ on which you pretend to set so high a value. Or did your heart run wildly away with you, and drag us into love and a cottage—a flat, I mean? If so, _I_ should prefer a little less heart and a little more common sense.” Geoffrey winced, twice indeed, feeling that her ladyship had hit him as it were with both barrels. For, as a matter of fact, he had not begun with any passionate devotion, and again Lady Honoria and he were now just as poor as though they had really married for love. “It is hardly fair to go back on bygones and talk like this,” he said, “even if your position had something to do with it; only at first of course, you must remember that when we married mine was not without attractions. Two thousand a year to start on and a baronetcy and eight thousand a year in the near future were not—but I hate talking about that kind of thing. Why do you force me to it? Nobody could know that my uncle, who was so anxious that I should marry you, would marry himself at his age, and have a son and heir. It was not my fault, Honoria. Perhaps you would not have married me if you could have foreseen it.” “Very probably not,” she answered calmly, “and it is not _my_ fault that I have not yet learned to live with peace of mind and comfort on seven hundred a year. It was hard enough to exist on two thousand till your uncle died, and now——” “Well, and now, Honoria, if you will only have patience and put up with things for a while, you shall be rich enough; I will make money for you, as much money as you want. I have many friends. I have not done so badly at the Bar this year.” “Two hundred pounds, nineteen shillings and sevenpence, minus ninety-seven pounds rent of chambers and clerk,” said Lady Honoria, with a disparaging accent on the sevenpence.