“Oh, well, I suppose, as I know no _better_, I must believe you,” and with a noisy sniff that intimated quite the reverse, Mrs. Kane glared once round their squalid sitting-room, to see if anything were broken or missing, or the valuable property damaged in any way; and, failing to discover the smallest pretext for complaint, passed out of the apartment with a heavy and aggressive strut, and banged the door behind her. Madeline lost not a second in rushing to the invalid with the great news, and placing the slip of pink paper in his hand. “There is something at last! I feel that a change is coming; these terrible days cannot--cannot go on for ever. I believe my father is alive, and coming home! What do you think, Laurence?” she asked, and her voice trembled. Laurence, still holding the telegram in his thin, transparent hand, gazed at his wife for some seconds in silence. How changed she was, he thought, with a pang of self-reproach. She was shabby--very genteelly shabby. Her black dress was all mended and pieced, her face was haggard, her eyes sunken, their look eager, anxious, almost desperate. An intelligent spectator would have declared that she was obviously half-starved, and so she was. But how furiously she would have disclaimed such a pronouncement. She would rather have died than have admitted that truth. As long as Laurence had meat once a day, as long as baby had milk, she did very well on anything, and anything may mean almost nothing--it is an elastic word. Meanwhile, Laurence had been telling himself that he had been a culpable wretch to marry Madeline West. What would he say to her father when he placed his daughter in his arms--a daughter in all but rags, with a face pinched with famine, without a friend, without a penny, and weighted with a dying husband and a peculiarly ill-tempered baby? How much better would it have been if he had curbed his foolish fancy--nipped it in the bud, and left Madeline to her fate. Why had he not wired to Mrs. Wolferton? What would her father say? Would he cast her off? Madeline had hinted that, as well as she could judge her father from his letters, he was fond of show and style and great people. He wished her to dance and sing and play well, and to speak French; but he had never said a word about literature, or the English classics, or what Laurence called “the higher education of women.” On the other hand, he hoped that she would always make acquaintance with girls her equals, or even superiors, and never lower herself by school-friendships that it would be impossible for him to recognize. Madeline had once innocently repeated this to her husband verbatim, and it came vividly before him now. Madeline had done more than form a friendship of which her aspiring parent would disapprove, a friendship that could be slipped out of like an old glove. Here she was tied for life to a poor man, whose only career seemed likely to be that of an invalid--a stone round her neck as long as he lived.