He was most terribly annoyed; the whole thing was a shock to him, and he was all the more annoyed because he was conscious that the increase to his income had been pleasant, and that it had helped to smooth their path so much. Without it how could he afford Grace's extravagant habits? He knew that the money coming from his own appointment was not enough, and out of that even he had given his mother something. If he now explained to her how could he explain without hurting his wife and showing that perfect confidence had not existed between them? In spite of all these considerations he never for one moment thought of retaining the money. To him it was the price of Margaret's happiness, and he now turned over in his mind how he could say something to his mother without entering into details which would be so painful to him. He turned away once more from his wife, and once again he said, as he had said before, "The money must go back." Grace was very miserable. She had learnt to love her husband and to find much to help her in his directness, and a certain strength she had not expected to find in his character. When she had married him she had thought that in all important things she would be the guiding star. He was slow in thought, and she valued her own quickness over-much; that position of being a sort of "Triton among minnows" at a second-class school influenced her fatally still, and to fall, as she had fallen, was a bitter mortification to her. She sat down now to write to Margaret, and, as she wrote and repeated her husband's sentiments, she began herself to see things more as he did. In the meantime poor Paul had a very difficult task before him. He had to make his mother understand, without explanations, that his promise of help, as far as a regular increase to her income went, could not be carried out. Lady Lyons heard with dismay, in which a certain irritation against him for having raised false hopes was plainly visible. "I have engaged a footman," she said, helplessly; "and now I must send him away. It will look so odd." "I am very sorry." "It would have been different, of course, if you had said nothing about it: then, you quite understand, Paul, that _then_ I could have had nothing to complain of." Paul did quite understand. He went out as soon as he could, going to his club and entering it with that sense of leaving domestic and other troubles behind him which makes club-land enviable to those who know it not. But the remembrance of his lessened resources came before him there. A friend asked him to give his subscription to help the family of a mutual friend. Paul was obliged to say, with great reluctance, that he found, on reconsideration, he could not do it. This was doubly hard, as, with the full consciousness of a good balance in the bank, he had himself originated the idea.