This was how Julia Desmond accounted for Maude’s long intervals of absent brooding, and that melancholy shadow which settled on her face whenever she fancied herself unnoticed, and for a while relaxed the heroic effort with which she tried to keep her promise, and guard her father’s secret. It was a very hard struggle. All the young idlers, the government clerks, the briefless but literary barristers, the rising artists who had narrowly escaped making palpable hits at the Royal Academy, or at a temple of art which they irreverently alluded to as the “British Inst,” all the accustomed Twickenham loungers flocked down to the Cedars to keep their Christmas holidays in the house of a gentleman whom they regarded as a sort of commercial Midas--a Moorgate Street Fortunatus, from whose inexhaustible coffers flowed the golden waters of perpetual prosperity: and Maude received all the old incense, and was fain to smile something like the old smiles upon her worshippers; while her heart ached with an unceasing pain, and a hidden dread that was like a palpable burden weighed for ever on her breast. “Oh, if they knew--if they only knew!” she thought. “They court me because they think I am rich, perhaps; but if they only knew what an imposture all this splendour is--these lights and flowers, and grapes and pines, and Sèvres china and Venetian glass, and all this long parade of dinner! if they knew that poverty and disgrace may come to us before the new year has well begun!” Sometimes, in her utter weariness of spirit, sometimes when the social comedy seemed almost too hard to act, Miss Hillary felt suddenly tempted to turn round upon her admirers, and cry to them,-- “Why do you torment me with your hackneyed compliments? I am _not_ the daughter of a millionaire; my father is only an imprudent speculator, who is hovering on the verge of a black abyss of bankruptcy and ruin. Go and offer your worship in some solvent temple, and leave me alone with my father and his sorrows.” This, or something akin to this, Miss Hillary was at times sorely tempted to utter. But she kept her promise. She had promised that no word or action of hers should betray the rottenness of her father’s position, and she kept a close watch upon herself. Her adorers--who were by no means so mercenary as she thought them--perceived that something was amiss with their goddess; but were far from associating anything so vulgar as the state of the money-market with the lessened lustre of her smiles. “She’s engaged to some fellow in the army, and her father won’t let her marry him, and the fellow writes her worrying letters; Miss Desmond told me as much,” the loungers said one to another, when confiding in each other about Miss Hillary.