The money-cloud had grown darker over Francis. It seemed impossible to make his expenditure acknowledge even a bowing acquaintance with his income. He had credit with the tradespeople but it was abused. Fifty pounds had become a large sum of money to him, because the payment of it meant dislocation of his finances. Frederic was always sending in small bills that were too large for his slender earnings. The girls--Mary and Gertrude were still called "the girls"--were always wanting money. Annette in Edinburgh hardly ever wrote without wanting money, and Mrs. Folyat seemed to have no notion of the decreasing elasticity of his resources. It was perfectly clear to him that a change must be made, and quickly. He went into his accounts, found that he owed three hundred and fifty pounds--nearly a year's stipend--and wrote the figures down on a scrap of paper and laid it before his wife. "We owe that," he said. "It's a lot of money." Mrs. Folyat turned the piece of paper round and round in her fingers, and Francis stood above her pulling at his beard. "It's a big sum," he said. Mrs. Folyat pulled out her handkerchief and began to whimper, as she always did when Francis was masterful. "I'm sure," she said, "I'm sure it's not my fault. I'm sure I wish we'd never come to this hateful pace. I don't know why we did." Francis felt a gust of exasperation. "We came here," he said, "to marry the girls. They're not married." Mrs. Folyat saw reproach in what was only a statement of fact, and she protested with some vehemence. The failure of her daughters hurt her. She felt it as keenly as Sarah, the wife of Abraham, felt her barrenness, for she saw life altogether in terms of marriage, romantic marriage. Her own life had fallen into the lines laid down by the fiction with which she refreshed herself--as a girl she had dreamed of a romantic lover--he had come--a parson, a creature of noble birth--and she had married him. She had borne him a truly biblical number of children and looked for them to follow a similar destiny. She had regarded it as a thing that happened automatically, for she was in mind a child, and life was to her a toy presented to her by a beneficent Creator, already wound up and prepared to go indefinitely. When apparently it ran down she could do nothing but weep and make things as uncomfortable as possible for those nearest her. She hated facts, and Francis, her husband, had the most odious habit of plumping them down in front of her.