A moment later she returned carrying on a tray two unsealed envelopes with half-penny stamps. From the half-malignant, half-triumphant look in her eyes, Catherine was almost sure she had examined their contents. After Florrie had gone, Catherine opened them. More bills! Peach and Lathergrew, butchers, High Road, Bockley, £6 16s. 2d. Batty, fish merchant, The Causeway, Upton Rising, £5 5s. 10d. The crisis was coming nearer! § 5 The persistent piling up of disaster upon disaster inflicted on her a kind of spiritual numbness, which made her for the most part insensible to panic. The first bill (the one from the grocer’s) had had a much more disturbing effect on her than any subsequent one or even than the cumulative effect of all of them when she thought about her worries _en masse_. There came a time when by constant pondering the idea of being hopelessly in debt struck her as a very inadequate reason for unhappiness. But at odd moments, as blow after blow fell, and as she slipped insensibly into a new stratum of society, there would come moments of supreme depression, when there seemed nothing in the world to continue to live for, and when the whole of her past life and future prospects seemed nothing but heaped-up agony. Her dreams mocked her with the romance of her subconsciousness. She would dream that she was the greatest pianist in the world, that the mightiest men and women of a hundred realms had gathered in one huge building to taste the magic of her fingers, that they cheered and applauded whilst she played things of appalling technical difficulty until she had perforce to stop because her instrument could no longer be heard above the frenzy of their shouting; that in the end she finished her repertoire of difficult concert pieces, and in response to repeated demands for an encore started to play a simple minuet of Beethoven, and that at the simple beauty of the opening chords the great assembly hushed its voice and remained tense and in perfect silence whilst she played. And, moreover, that her quick eye had noticed in a far and humble corner of the building Ray Verreker, straining to catch the music of the woman whose fingers he had guided to fame. He was in rags and tatters, and it was plain that fortune had played despicably with him. But, amidst the thunderous applause that shook the building when her fingers had come to rest, her eye caught his and she beckoned to him to approach. He came, and she held out both her magic hands to raise him to the platform. “This is my master,” she cried, in a voice that lifted the furthest echoes, “this is my teacher, the one whose creature I am, breath of my body, fire of my spirit! The honour you heap upon me I share with him!”