She broke down just a little as she said this; she could not speak quite calmly of that most terrible loss of all--the loss of her father’s commercial honour. She remembered, very dimly, long prosy discussions that she had heard at Mr. Hillary’s dinner-table, about men who had failed, and who had failed through some dishonesty or recklessness of their own, and whose downfall had involved the hard-won fortunes of others, making a vast circle of ruin, spreading as the watery circle spreads when you drop a pebble into a tideless lake. From this time it almost seemed as if a new life began for Maude Hillary. No more careless idling over new music, no more eager commencements of expensive fancy-work that was never to be finished! After Miss Hillary’s return to the Cedars, anyone taking the trouble to watch her closely might have perceived a wonderful alteration in her conduct--a change that was almost a transformation in her very nature. When she opened her piano now, it was for no idle trifling with fashionable difficulties, no coquetting with shakes, and skipping of arpeggios. She practised steadily, and for hours together. Might not the time be very near at hand in which she would be called upon to gird on her armour, and join the ranks of the bread-winners? She thought of herself in a dingy London street, somewhere in the dreary region between Holborn and the New Road--the region which was once a fair expanse of pleasant meadow-land. She thought of herself toiling as so many women toiled, leading the same dull life from day to day; and her courage did not fail her even before that dismal picture. It was not likely that this change in Maude Hillary could escape the notice of so observant a young lady as Miss Desmond. Julia saw and wondered, but she was far from guessing the real cause of Maude’s unusual gravity. “I suppose she is making herself unhappy about Harcourt Lowther,” thought Miss Desmond. “These fortunate people always contrive to find _one_ crumpled leaf in their beds of roses. She is making herself miserable about that handsome, worthless soldier, and she thinks herself hardly used because she cannot play at love in a cottage, with a rich mercantile father to pay the expenses of the idyllic _ménage_.”