“That’s the butcher’s book,” she said. “He’s sent nothing in for three days. We’ve been living on leavings. He’s sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker’s. He’s not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It’s done now—and _he’s_ done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month’s supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines—and coal and wood—and laundry—and milk. And here is wages, ma’am, which _can’t_ go on any longer.” Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. “Oh, go away!—go away!” she cried. “If Mr. Lawless were here—” “He isn’t, ma’am,” Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been—a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. “As long as there’s a gentleman in a house there’s generally a sort of a prospect that things _may_ be settled some way. At any rate there’s someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there’s no gentleman and nothing—and nobody—respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves.” The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer’s death had left “Nothing” and “Nobody” was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. “Oh! go away! Go _awa-ay!_” Feather almost shrieked. “I am going, ma’am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It’s no use waiting and giving the month’s notice. We shouldn’t save the month’s wages and the trades-people wouldn’t feed us. We can’t stay here and starve. And it’s a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can’t hold it against us, ma’am. It’s better for you to have us out of the house tonight—which is when our boxes will be taken away.” Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone—not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. “Do you mean,” she cried out, “that you are all going to _leave_ the house—that there won’t be any servants to wait on me—that there’s nothing to eat or drink—that I shall have to stay here _alone_—and starve!”