Her father and mother were alone in the study for a long time; she remembered Annie going in with the lamp and coming out and whispering that they wanted her. She found them sitting in the lamplight alone, close together, holding each other’s hands; their faces had a strange, exalted look. “Harriett, my dear, I’ve lost every shilling I possessed, and here’s your mother saying she doesn’t mind.” He began to explain in his quiet voice. “When all the creditors are paid in full there’ll be nothing but your mother’s two hundred a year. And the insurance money when I’m gone.” “Oh, Papa, how terrible----” “Yes, Hatty.” “I mean the insurance. It’s gambling with your life.” “My dear, if that was all I’d gambled with----” It seemed that half his capital had gone in what he called “the higher mathematics of the game.” The creditors would get the rest. “We shall be no worse off,” her mother said, “than we were when we began. We were very happy then.” “We. How about Harriett?” “Harriett isn’t going to mind.” “You’re not--going--to mind.... We shall have to sell this house and live in a smaller one. And I can’t take my business up again.” “My dear, I’m glad and thankful you’ve done with that dreadful, dangerous game.” “I’d no business to play it.... But, after holding myself in all those years, there was a sort of fascination.” One of the creditors, Mr. Hichens, gave him work in his office. He was now Mr. Hichens’s clerk. He went to Mr. Hichens as he had gone to his own great business, upright and alert, handsome in his dark-gray overcoat with the black velvet collar, faintly amused at himself. You would never have known that anything had happened. Strange that at the same time Mr. Hancock should have lost money, a great deal of money, more money than Papa. He seemed determined that everybody should know it; you couldn’t pass him in the road without knowing. He met you with his swollen, red face hanging; ashamed and miserable, and angry as if it had been your fault. One day Harriett came in to her father and mother with the news. “Did you know that Mr. Hancock’s sold his horses? And he’s going to give up the house.” Her mother signed to her to be silent, frowning and shaking her head and glancing at her father. He got up suddenly and left the room. “He’s worrying himself to death about Mr. Hancock,” she said. “I didn’t know he cared for him like that, Mamma.” “Oh, well, he’s known him thirty years, and it’s a very dreadful thing he should have to give up his house.” “It’s not worse for him than it is for Papa.” “It’s ever so much worse. He isn’t like your father. He can’t be happy without his big house and his carriages and horses. He’ll feel so small and unimportant.” “Well, then, it serves him right.” “Don’t say that. It _is_ what he cares for and he’s lost it.”