The roses in the blue bowls were drooping, candle-grease had dropped on to the keys of the piano, the open door of the china closet displayed dusty shelves and a floor on which the gay red-and-blue rugs were kicked up. Pamela saw these things; they reminded her sharply of the change that of late had come over her. She no longer took a housewifely pride in anything; her life was occupied in playing cat, with Nancy and Edred for mice. “Are you going to marry Nancy?” she asked abruptly. “Are you going to marry Jethro?” he returned aptly. “I--I suppose so. And yet, when it comes to the point---- Everything depends on you.” She looked at him again in an appealing way. “We’re in a bit of a mess,” he said, shrugging his thin shoulders and impatiently pulling the fine points of his black mustache. She hunched her shoulders and clenched her hands between her knees as if she were in actual physical pain. “Oh! why did you come?” she moaned. “Nonsense. It was very fortunate for me. I couldn’t have kept on with sewing-machines--cut my throat, rather. And you can’t execute a _coup_ of any kind without capital. This sort of thing isn’t permanent, of course. Old Jeth’s getting sick--he’s a good fellow. Men of that type always show their feeling in mean ways. He ought to swear at me, kick me out--he only looks blue when I fill up my glass. I must either marry Nancy--it can’t make any difference to you, Pam--or I must get a couple of hundred to set me up in life again. There are lots of good things going in the City--beastly nuisance not seeing the evening papers. My head is full of ideas. If I had a couple of hundreds I could turn them into thousands in a week. Balaclavas have run up to----” “Don’t talk to me about stocks; I don’t understand--and it is so unimportant----” “By Jove! it’s all-important to me.” She straightened her curved back. He saw a convulsive lump working in her throat, and the rims of her lids grew faintly pink. He frowned. She was going to cry. A woman’s tears lashed him to any sort of brutality. “When I saw you kiss Nancy,” she broke out, “it nearly killed me.” “So you saw! But when old Jeth kisses you, in his open, whole-hearted, smacking fashion?” “It doesn’t affect you. Men are different--and you more different than any other man,” she said confusedly. “This sort of thing doesn’t help us,” he cried impatiently. “Which shall it be? Turle, with Nancy as a wife and Aunt Sophy as a mother-in-law, or London, with two hundred pounds in my pocket?” “I haven’t fifty pounds.” “But Jethro has. Get it out of him; you’ll do it better than I should. Go to him frankly; say I’ve a scheme for making a fortune. He will be delighted to get rid of me. He’s suspicious, without knowing why, poor chap. This brother and sister humbug is the merest farce. If these people were not fools, the most generous, gullible fools in the world, they would have found us out long ago.”