With these, and other family amenities, was the time of dining enlivened. Mrs. Elles’ attitude was one of faintly raised eyebrows, but she did not allow herself to say anything to-day, that a heroine might regret. She was not generally so circumspect. As soon as dinner was over, she rose and followed Mrs. Poynder out of the room. Mrs. Poynder liked to go first, and she was allowed to do so when no one was there. Mortimer Elles, who was by no means in a bad humour, moved his chair a little to make way for his wife. “Do you call that a gown?” he said, fingering a fold of the shining satin. “And pray, what may that have cost me?” “Don’t!” she said, drawing it away. “Surely I may touch it if I am to have the privilege of paying for it?” “It is not very nice of you, Mortimer, to remind me that I haven’t a penny of my own, and must depend on your bounty!” “And a good job, too!” he said, laughing; he was certainly in a very good humour. “It’s the only hold I’ve got on you--the only way I have of keeping you in order.” “Mortimer--I am not a child!” “No, by Jove, not quite! Let me see, you were nineteen when I married you--we have been married ten years--that makes you out--?” “You needn’t trouble to go on,” she replied haughtily, “I can’t say that the subject interests me--one only counts birthdays when one is happy.” She escaped to her room, tore off the gauzy tea gown, and put on a black one which she reserved for occasions like this, when the mood of gloom preponderated. It was a little affectation of hers to dress as far as possible in character with her mood of the moment. Yes, she was very wretched--had been for the last ten years. She wondered how she had borne it so long, and if she could go on bearing it. The time had surely come for her to do something--what? She would go, to-morrow, and call on Egidia in the big house where she was staying at Jesmond Dene, and talk it all over with her. Egidia, being a professed searcher into the secrets of the heart, would be able to understand, and perhaps offer some solution of her dreadful predicament. She might even take a professional interest in it. “She can put me in a novel if she likes,” Phœbe Elles said to herself, wearily, “but I must speak or I shall die!” Die of dullness, die of disappointment, die of inanition, or, what was worse, lose her looks. “They are the silent griefs that cut the heart-strings,” she quoted, from Heaven knows what recondite Elizabethan play, “and dull the complexion,” she added on her responsibility. She always read everything more or less with reference to herself, and twisted the most impassioned utterances of poetry and the drama into apt coincidence with her own affairs.