Lucian said little of this reverse of fortune--he was to all appearance unmoved by it; but Sprats, who could read his face as easily as she could read an open book, saw new lines write themselves there which told of surprise, disappointment, and anxiety, and she knew from his subdued manner and the unwonted reticence which he observed at this stage that he was thinking deeply of more things than one. In this she was right. Lucian by sheer force of circumstances had been dragged to a certain point of vantage whereat he was compelled to stand and look closely at the prospect which confronted him. When it became evident that the tragedy was a failure as a money-making concern, he remembered, with a sudden shock that subdued his temperamental buoyancy in an unpleasant fashion, that he had not foreseen such a contingency, and that he had confidently expected a success as great as the failure was complete. He sat down in his study and put the whole matter to himself in commendably brief fashion: for several months he and Haidee had been living and spending money on anticipation; it was now clear that the anticipation was not to be realised. The new volume was selling very slowly; the tragedy was a financial failure; very little in the way of solid cash would go from either to the right side of Lucian’s account at Darlington’s. And on the wrong side there must be an array of figures which he felt afraid to think of. He hurriedly cast up in his mind a vague account of those figures which memory presented to him; when he added the total to an equally vague guess of what Haidee might have spent, he recognised that he must be in debt to the bank to a considerable amount. He had never had the least doubt that the tragedy would prove a gold-mine--everybody had predicted it. Darlington had predicted it a hundred times, and Darlington was a keen, hard-headed business man. Well, the tragedy was a failure--to use the expressive term of the man in the street, ‘there was no money in it.’ It was to have replenished Lucian’s coffers--it left them yawning.