When Dolly was married, no girl could have come to a husband with more economical ideas than she possessed. Poverty and she had been friends all her life; she had been accustomed to shortness of money, to frugal fare, to the closest and strictest expenditure from her childhood upwards, and had Mortomley been wise as he was amiable, she might have regarded changing a five-pound note with a certain awe and hesitation to the end of her days. In money as in other matters, however, she speedily, in that different atmosphere, lost her head. There can be no greater mistake than to suppose, because a person has made both ends meet on, say a hundred and fifty pounds a year, he will be able to manage comfortably on fifteen hundred; on the contrary, he is nearly certain either to turn miser or spendthrift. Dolly had not the faintest idea how to deal with a comfortable income, and as her husband was as incompetent as herself, he let her have pretty well her own way, which was a very bad way indeed. Like his wife, perhaps, he thought those legacies represented a great deal more money than was the case, since money only represents money according to the way in which it chances to be expended. It is not in the unclouded noontide, however, when fortune wears its brightest smiles, that any one dreams of the wild night--the darkness of despair to follow. It seems to me that the stories we hear of second sight, of presentiments, of warnings, had a deeper origin than the usual superstitious fantasies we associate with them. I think they were originally intended as parables--as prophecies. I believe the words of dark import were designed to convey to the man--prosperous, victorious--safe in the security of his undiscovered sins, the same lesson that Nathan's final sentence, "Thou art the Man," conveyed in _his_ hour of fancied safety to the heart of David. I believe under the disguise of a thrice-told tale, those inscrutable warnings of which we hear, arresting a man in the middle of a questionable story or a peal of drunken laughter, were meant to be as truly writings on the wall as ever silenced the merriment in Belshazzar's halls--as certainly prophecies as that dream which prefigured Nebuchadnezzar's madness. And there was a time when portents, prophecies, and parables did influence men for good, did turn them from the evil, did turn their thoughts from earth to heaven, but that was in the days when people having time to think--thought; when sometimes alone, separate from their fellow-creatures, able to forget for a period the world and its requirements, they were free to think of that which, spite of a learned divine's dictum, is more wonderful and more bewildering than eternity--the soul of man--the object of his creation, the use and reason and purpose of his ever having been made in God's image to walk erect upon the earth.