As a matter of fact, he had remembered, even while she was speaking, a monstrously ugly photograph of Fanny,--Fanny surrounded by her dogs and children,--which had appeared in a well-known lady's paper. Why, she had actually sent the paper to him, marked! But Oliver magnanimously refrained from reminding her of this,--the more so, that Fanny had hurried on from the trifling question of Bella's portrait to the more serious and unpleasant one of her brother's moderate income. But, as Germaine now told himself complacently, he had been very short with her. In fact he had administered a good brotherly snub to inquisitive Fanny. She had no business to ask him a lot of questions concerning the way he and Bella chose to spend their income; it was no business of hers how the money was spent. Unfortunately Fanny did consider it her business, simply owing to the fact that she was Oliver's only sister, and very fond of him,--that went without saying,--and that unluckily her husband was Oliver's trustee. So it was that she had shown extraordinary curiosity as to how her brother and his wife managed to live in the way they did, on the income she knew they had. "Do you know," she had said gravely, "exactly what your income is?" Oliver had nodded impatiently. Of course he knew, roughly speaking, that he and Bella had a little over two thousand a year---- "Two thousand and sixty-one pounds, eighteen shillings," she had gone on impressively. "At least that was what it was last year, for I asked Dick." Now Dick was Fanny's husband, and a most excellent fellow, but hopelessly under Fanny's thumb. Oliver Germaine had not always been so well off. In fact, when he first met Bella--something like six years ago--he had been a subaltern, with a very small private income, in a Line regiment. And it was on that small income that the loveliest girl in Southsea--now the most beautiful woman in London--had married him. Then had come an immense, unlooked-for piece of good fortune! A distant Scotch cousin, a crusty old chap, of whom all the Germaines were afraid, and who had constantly declared it to be his intention to leave his money outside his own family, had chosen to make Oliver his heir, and had appointed Fanny's husband, the steady-going, rather dull Shropshire squire, as trustee. Of course Oliver, and even more Bella, knew now that the fortune which had seemed then to make them rich beyond their wildest dreams, was not so very much after all. But still, at first, it had been plenty--plenty for everything they could reasonably require.