She gripped his arm. "Don't go like this! Whatever it is, don't run away. Is it very bad? Is it--" the word that stood for the worst business misfortune she could imagine, trembled and died on her lips--"is it _Failure_?" He pulled his muffler about his face, his hat lower upon his brow: "You've hit it," he said. "It's that." Her hand slid from his coat-sleeve, he slipped through the half-open door, and shuffled down the three white steps which led to the silent street. Then, as white, half-stupefied, she watched him, he turned and climbed the steps again and stood beside her. "You had better go to George Boult," he said. "Boult will tell you what to do. Are you listening? Go to Boult." "But aren't you coming back to-morrow, William? You can't leave us like this! You must come back!" He was going down the steps again. There was a moon clear in a frosty sky. How white the steps shone! For all her life she remembered the big, unwieldy figure of her husband shuffling down them. "I don't know what my movements may be. Just at present they are uncertain." Arrived on the pavement he turned his miserable, furtive eyes on her as she stood in the open door, the brightly-lit hall of home behind her. "Shut the door," he said with something of his old passionate irritability of manner. "I don't want all the world to know I'm going away to-night. Shut the door!" She obeyed him, as ever when he used that tone to her, with nervous haste. William Day waited a moment to hear the bolts slipping into place. It was a duty he performed himself every night of his life as he went up to bed. The door was bolted with him on the wrong side of it, now. Never, he knew, in all the years to come would he turn the lock of security on the sleeping house and shuffle upstairs, bed-candle in hand, to warmth and comfort and peaceful sleep again. Mrs. Day, going back into the hall, came to a standstill beneath the hanging lamp, trying to collect her thoughts, trying to realise, but totally unable to do so, that ruin had come upon her home, her children, herself. Ruin which she had seen visit the homes of other people, devastate them; but whose shadow she had never imagined falling on the fortunes of her own. On the William Days; so well-to-do; so respected in the place; who had their annual dance last night, all the nicest, most desirable people of the town present. No one's dance was so nicely managed, so spirited, so successful as theirs. She was actually thinking of the dance as she stood there, dazed, in the gas-lit hall. They would never give another New Year's dance.