What an awful millstone to carry about with one! Fancy the men at the street-corners chatting together, or groups standing at the Chamber of Commerce windows, or the members of the Club, or his own staff at the Bank, looking after him with compassionate eyes, and saying: "Poor Wat! How sad and worn and broken-down he looks! What a wretched thing! What a dreadful thing when a man's wife is a--drunkard!" The last word was always haunting his ears, always booming in the hollow caverns through which his fears followed him during sleep; and although the habit of Mrs. Grey had not yet become so confirmed as to justify the application of such an odious epithet, her case was growing no better, growing rather worse with time. All the Midharst money was gone. Her fault was at most a vice; but he had committed a crime. He lay between two fears; he was threatened by two discoveries. Someone might find out about her, and blast the fame of the Manor House; someone might find out about him, and blast the Daneford Bank, and lock him up in jail, and brand the name he bore with ignominy. In such a state of mind was Grey when the 16th of August arrived and evening brought him home. The husband and wife sat down alone to dinner, sat down alone to the last dinner they were ever to eat together. "Bee," said Grey to his wife, when the dessert had been brought in and the servants had gone, "do you think you could go down to Seacliff in the _Rodwell_ to-morrow evening, and look up the cottage? I saw the estimable and penurious landlord of it to-day. It's not occupied this month, and he wanted me to take it from the 20th. I'm half inclined to accept his offer. He says we can have it from the 20th of this month to the end of September for a month's rent. It would be almost worth while to take him at his word, and hear how he'd whine if I gave him a cheque for the month's rent only. What are those two famous items out of last year's bill?" "Brunswick varnish, for the kitchen coal-scuttle, 2_d._; and a pair of brass stair-eyes, one lost and one damaged, 2_d._," quoted Mrs. Grey seriously, as if the imposition was intolerable. "Yes, yes. That's it. Brunswick varnish and stair-eyes," laughed Grey. "And at the end of all the items for damage was the general observation: 'The same being in excess of reasonable wear and tear.' Didn't he make us whiten all the ceilings, too, on the grounds that we stopped far into the season and blackened them with the lamps?" "Yes, Wat." "Is it three or four times we have paid, Bee, for cracking that soup-tureen? The old crack, you know." "We've paid, I think, Wat, only twice for that crack, but he has charged us with the ladle every year, although we never had one."