She dressed herself at last under the spur of Ismay’s incessant knocking and calling, but though her iron nerve kept her face steady, her knees were trembling under her as she followed the girl into the bare kitchen, where half a loaf of bread and some weak tea represented their morning meal. Ismay sat down on the table and regarded her mother over the piece of dry bread she held to her lips. “Look here,” she remarked slowly, “don’t you think it’s about time you did something? Are we going to sit here and starve? And do you know that Marcus Wray was knocking here this morning and I wouldn’t go to the door?” Even the dirty dressing-gown, the weariness that drew down her upper lip, could not take away from her unearthly beauty as her mother stared at her. “Do something!” she retorted. “I’ve done all I can. That is what’s the matter. And we sha’n’t certainly sit here and starve, for I heard this morning that we are to be turned out on Saturday and our things sold for rent. We shall starve more romantically in the street.” “I sha’n’t.” “What can you do? Go back to your school as a pupil teacher?” “Do I look like a pupil teacher?” asked Ismay, with a sarcastic glance at herself. “You look--well, I don’t know whether you are very beautiful or very ugly!” the elder woman returned listlessly, trying to break some dry bread with distasteful fingers. “You’ll soon be told! Mother”--with sudden energy--“if you can’t find some way out of this, I shall. I can sing, and I’m going round to every music-hall I know till some man gives me a chance. Do you suppose”--she stripped back the sleeve of her dingy dressing-gown from an arm that was curiously slender, yet round, and of a milky whiteness--“that I am going to let that starve?” “And what about me? I suppose I can go out charing!” Ismay shrugged her shoulders. There was no waste of courtesy between the two. In the silence that fell, the postman’s knock seemed to thunder through the quiet. Mrs. Trelane put her cup down on the table. “You go,” she said, for at the sudden noise her head swam. Surely she had not lost her nerve, that had stood her in such stead this many a year! “Two letters--notes--for you.” Ismay threw them down on the table, and, after one glance of sick terror lest they might not be what she waited for, Mrs. Trelane seized them. Both were in the writing she had not seen for years, both sealed with the Le Marchant lion crouching with his paw on his prey. But why were there two? Had he promised something, and then repented? Sick with terror, Helen Trelane tore one open, and at first dared not read it. Then the sense of it seemed to flash on her, and the reaction made her dizzy. It was all right! The last card, on which she had staked her all, had not failed her. The writer would be in London on Friday, and would come to see her at twelve o’clock, when he hoped to have some better plan to propose than what she had suggested in her letter.