Still, her character was strengthening. With every day that went by she learnt more of the power of endurance; she became more patient, more fixed in her ideas; the goal of her desires was set more immediately in front of her. It was less visionary, but it was infinitely more substantial. In a desultory kind of a way she still worked, still wrote of lords and ladies whom she did not know in the flesh, still drew pictures of guardsmen with longer legs and tawnier moustaches even than before. She spent the whole of her pocket-money (which, by the bye, consisted of certain perquisites in the house, the medicine bottles and the dripping forming her chief sources of income) on manuscript paper, and was sometimes hard pushed to pay the postage on the mysterious packages which she smuggled into the post-office, and to provide the stamps for paying the return fare of these children of her fancy. Poor things, they always required it. No enterprising editors wanted the long-legged guardsmen, their blue eyes and tawny moustaches notwithstanding. Nobody had a welcome for the lovely ladies, who were all dressed by Worth, though they never seemed to have heard of such a person as Felix. The disappointments of their continued return were very bitter to her; yet, at heart, Nancy Macdonald was a true artist, and had all the true artist’s pluck and perseverance, so that she never thought of giving up her work. It was only that she had not yet found her _métier_. CHAPTER II For about six months after Nancy’s promise to her mother that she would not even try to write during the working hours, life went fairly prosperously with the widowed boarding-house keeper. Then a spell of bad luck set in. Several boarders left and were not replaced. Their best paying permanent boarder--a rich old gentleman, the head of a large business in the city--died suddenly, died without a will, although he had several times spoken of his intention of leaving Mrs. Macdonald a handsome legacy; and his next-of-kin did not seem to think it necessary to do more than pay the actual expenses which their relative had incurred. Twice they had visitors who left without paying their bills; and, as a last crowning act of ill-luck, the youngest child fell sick, and the doctor pronounced the illness to be scarlet fever. "When troubles come, they come not single spies, But in battalions"; and that is as true to-day as when Shakespeare penned the lines more than three hundred years ago.