only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants’ wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street—would the servants go away—would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. “It’s awful—it’s awful—it’s awful!” broke out between her sobs. “What can I do? I can’t do anything! There’s nothing to do! It’s awful—it’s awful—it’s awful!” She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted—though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one’s nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. “It’s time for lunch,” she thought. “I’m faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water.” It was not Tonson’s custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul—that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise—do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in—Rob’s awful little room adjoining—which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics—were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb—the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place.