Mr. Tredethlyn was slow to answer. He was looking round the room, and out at the leaden ball floating on the surface of a dingy leaden cistern visible athwart some scarecrow geraniums, which seemed as if they had been put upon a short allowance of mould. Everything in the place, from the scrimped morsel of worn carpet, which only made an oasis of Kidderminster in a dreary desert of boards, to the handful of red coals that burned brightly between massive embankments of brick, bore mute evidence to the poverty which struggles and endures. An open cupboard stared Francis in the face, and he saw, oh, such a pitiful morsel of sickly-complexioned ham lying cheek by jowl with the fag-end of a stale half-quartern loaf. He looked at these things, and remembered the house in which he lived, the reckless extravagance that pervaded all his life. “Does a curse cling to the gold of a miser?” he thought; “and is my uncle Oliver’s child never to derive any advantage from the wealth her father scraped and pinched together, at the cost of everything that makes life endurable?” He roused himself from his brief reverie to appeal once more to the elderly ballet-girl, who had seated herself by the little Pembroke table, on which lay a newspaper evidently borrowed from the establishment below, and transformed into a kind of parchment by the action of grease. “Give me what information you can about my cousin,” he said, imploringly; “and if you will accept any little present from me in acknowledgment of your kindness, I will send you a cheque to-morrow morning, and you shall purchase what you please as a memorial of your friendship for my poor little Susy.” A faint flush kindled in Miss Willoughby’s pale cheeks. A cheque! Oh, bright representative of an El Dorado, only to be thought of in some happy dream. Clara Willoughby--otherwise Mary Anne Jones--had not seen such a thing as a cheque since the happy time in which she had been columbine at the tumble-down little theatre in a garrison town, and the colonel himself had taken five pounds’ worth of tickets for her benefit. “You are very kind,” she said; “but I don’t want any payment for the little help I can give you. Miss Turner is a very quiet young person; and, though we were so friendly together, she never told me anything of her history; and when she went away this morning, having only been taken on as an extra, and her engagement expiring last night, she said, ‘You’ve been very good to me, Clara, and I shall always remember you kindly; and if things go well with me, I’ll write and tell you where I am. You mustn’t be offended because I don’t tell you where I am going. I don’t quite know myself. I have not made up my mind yet; there’s a place I want to go to, and friends I want to see; but I don’t think I shall ever bring my mind to go there, or to see them.’”