"What! ain't the money all right?" she said. "You don't say so! Well, ma, you _have_ been clever this time, haven't you? Oh I suppose you thought I didn't know what you were after when you were so careful about not bothering me with the accounts? Lor! I knew fast enough. Don't you feel proud of yourself for having managed it so well?" Mrs. Bryant wept. Percival, not having a word to say, preserved a dignified silence. "Come along, ma: I dare say Mr. Thorne has had about enough of this," Lydia went on, coolly examining the paper which lay on the table. She arrived at the total. "Oh that's it, is it? Well, I like that, I do! Some people are so clever, ain't they? So wonderfully sharp they can't trust their own belongings! I do like that! Come along, ma." And Lydia seconded her summons with such energetic action that it seemed to Percival that she absolutely swept the old lady out of the room, and that the wet handkerchief, the rusty black gown and the bugle-sprinkled head-dress vanished in a whirlwind, with a sound of shrill laughter on the stairs. For a moment his heart leapt with a sudden sense of relief and freedom, but only for a moment. Then he flung himself into his arm-chair, utterly dejected and sickened. Should he be subject to this kind of thing all his life long? If he should chance to be ill and unable to work, how could he live for any length of time on his paltry savings? And debt would mean _this_! He need not even be ill. He remembered how he broke his arm once when he was a lad. Suppose he broke his arm now--a bit of orange-peel in the street might do it--or suppose he hurt the hand with which he wrote? And this was the life which he might ask Judith to share with him! She might endure Mrs. Bryant's scolding and Lydia's laughter, and pinch and save as he was forced to do, and grow weary and careworn and sick at heart. No, God forbid! And yet--and yet--was she not enduring as bad or worse in that hateful school? Oh for his dream! One week of life and love, and then swift exit from a hideous world, where Mrs. Bryant and Miss Macgregor and Lydia and all his other nightmares might do their worst and fight their hardest in their ugly struggle for existence! Percival had achieved something of a victory in his encounter with his landlady. His manner had been calm and fairly easy, and from first to last she had been more conscious of his calmness than Percival was himself. She had been silenced, not coaxed and flattered as she often was by unfortunate lodgers whose ready money ran short. Indeed, she had been defied, and when she recovered herself a little she declared that she had never seen any one so stuck up as Mr. Thorne. This was unkind, after he had gone down on his knees to look for her spectacles.