He was not a man to doubt his own wisdom, or to seek to confirm an opinion with the approval of others, or to hesitate in the pursuit of a course which to his perceptions appeared desirable. Also, having mapped out his plan or set out on his chosen path he never afterwards allowed to himself that there were others. A simple method which reduced to nothing for him the chances of regret or mental worry. He was an eminently successful tradesman. His draper's business, which had been on a par with the businesses of half a dozen drapers when he had originally started in Brockenham, was now easily the first of its kind, not only in the town but in the county. It was natural that he should believe in trade--natural that he should fix his faith to nothing else as a means of money-making. "There's nothing like business," he said to Mrs. Day. She was seated in his private counting-room on the upper floor of the big shop--it was half a dozen shops joined into one now. To reach that room she had to pass through an ante-room full of entering clerks, busy at their desks. They lifted their heads from their quill-driving to look at the poor woman as she went by. She went with hanging head, her thick widow's veil over her face, the thought in her mind, "Perhaps among the poor clerks that collection of six shillings and ninepence had been made." Perhaps one of the chilblain-fingered girls behind the counters down below had been the "Sympathiser" to whom she had been indebted for a shilling. She was humbled to the earth. It was so she would have described her condition, as she walked to her interview with George Boult. If she had been told that her heart, on the contrary, was filled with pride, and beating high with rebellion, and that it was just the want of humility within her, who yet contrived to present a humble bearing, which made everything so unnecessarily painful, she would not have believed. When, seated opposite to him at the small square leather-covered writing-table in the draper's counting-house, she turned back her veil, he noticed at once the ravages which grief and shame and anxiety had made in her face. He was quick to notice, because, practical, hard-working, hard-headed widower as he was, he had an eye for female beauty, and the handsome dark face of his friend's wife--the woman who, in the days of her haughtiness, had turned her back on him and kept him at arm's length--he had unwillingly admired. The face of Lydia Day now was that of a woman who had been plump but was so no longer. The cheeks which had been firm and full were pendulous, the healthily pale but brunette complexion was of a leaden pallor; in the darkened skin beneath the deep-set, large dark eyes, little puckers showed. Her figure, too, had fallen away. She had lost her proud, self-assured carriage.