"I am certain he would if he could have foreseen a time like this," the lawyer answered. "But you must remember men do not anticipate bankruptcy as a rule. When they do, it is far too late to talk of settlements. If every one were prudent and foreseeing, misfortunes such as these could not occur; but bankruptcy is not a pleasant eventuality for a person to contemplate, though it is undoubtedly true that every business man ought to order his course just as if he expected to go into the 'Gazette' within a week." "We hear something like that every Sunday about living as if we were dying, don't we, Mr. Leigh?" she asked, with a little gasping sob, "but we none of us practise what we are told. I wonder now," Dolly added, addressing no one in particular, but speaking her thoughts out loud, "whether the clergy are right after all, whether, if we all go on as we are going, we shall, men and women alike, prove utter bankrupts at the Judgment-day. An immortality of insolvency is not a pleasant future to contemplate; but it may be true. I dare say it will be perfectly true for some of us." Mr. Leigh was eminently a safe man--safe in morals, religion, politics, and money matters, and nothing offended his ideas more than wild utterances and random talk, for which reason Mrs. Mortomley's last sentence proved more distasteful than even her candidly expressed doubt as to his thorough acquaintance with the new Bankruptcy Act. But he was kind, and if his visitor had occasionally a curious and unpleasant way of communicating her ideas, he could see underlying all external eccentricities that she was in fearful trouble, not because she dreaded being unable to renew her laces and replace her silks--truth being, Dolly had never descended even mentally to such details--but because she had taken a phantom to nurse and reared it into a giant. Some one, it was necessary, should adopt measures to destroy the giant, he decided, ere it destroyed her. "Mrs. Mortomley," he began, "you ought to get out of town for a short time--" "And leave my husband?" "No, take him with you." She shook her head. "You do not know how ill he is. No one knows how ill he is but me, not even the doctors." "He would get stronger if he were away, and he must be strong before the meeting of creditors. Ask the doctors, and be guided by their advice. Now let me entreat of you to be influenced by what they may say." "If it were possible to move him it might be better," she said thoughtfully, "but he could not go without me, and I suppose I ought to be at Homewood." "Why, are Miss Halling and her brother and all those men you told me about not sufficient to take care of the place?" asked Mr. Leigh. She opened her lips to tell him that Rupert and Antonia had left, but closed them again, feeling ashamed to say how utterly desolate she and her husband were in their extremity. "I think I ought to stay," she remarked at last.