With a smothered moan she rose and walked unsteadily across the room to where her dark cloak hung upon a peg in the corner. She slipped her hand into the pocket and drew out a little port-monnaie of pearl and silver. “I always had plenty of money in my purse,” she thought, “Perhaps I have enough to give the Fieldings some now.” She opened it and an exclamation of disappointment broke from her pale lips. There was only a five dollar bill and some loose change in it. She remembered then that she had left home on so desperate a mission that she had taken nothing with her. It was by the merest accident, and not by design that the little purse had been in her pocket. “Only five dollars, and I wanted to help them so much,” she sobbed, bursting into babyish tears. It was the first time in her young life that she had ever felt the need of money. And while she stood there forlornly weeping she remembered that only one day before Talbot Strangemore had come home she had put away five hundred dollars in the secret bottom of her jewel casket for safe-keeping. “If I only had that five hundred dollars out of all the wealth I have left behind me, how rich I would feel,” she murmured, “I would give every penny to these noble people. We could go to the sea-shore then, and it would do Mrs. Fielding and the baby as much good as it would me.” She began to revolve all sorts of schemes in her mind for obtaining possession of the money hidden in her jewel casket at Selwyn Heights. “I believe that I could easily enter the house by night, obtain the money, and slip away again unobserved,” she thought. The fancy took possession of her mind. Perhaps there was blended with it an undefined longing to know what Talbot and the rest of them were doing now that they believed her dead and lost to them forever. She persuaded herself that nothing could be easier than to go to Selwyn Heights, get her money, and come away again, all without being discovered. “And I am compelled to have it,” she reasoned, “I intend to cast my lot with the Fieldings henceforth, and I must have money to live upon until I get strong enough to work for my daily bread.” A faint smile crossed her lips at the thought of one of the Selwyns, whose pride and wealth had descended to them through many generations, working like a pauper for daily bread. “But even that would not be so bad as what that dreadful woman talked about so coolly,” Nina thought, with a lump in her throat, that hurt her cruelly, “I could bear anything rather than the world should say that Nina Selwyn was put away by her husband because he did not love her. It is a shame to a woman to be divorced. I could not have borne the disgrace of it. Talbot was cruelly hard and unkind to suggest it to that woman!”