‘Oh, I thought you were going to ask, like my aunt in England, what I did when I was asked out, and had no chaperon to take me,’ said Sara, laughing. ‘Am I dependent on my art for the means of subsistence? No! I have just one hundred pounds a year of my own, Herr Falkenberg, safe and secure.’ ‘I am glad of that,’ said he, with a sympathetic smile of relief. ‘It makes all the difference. With that income certain, you may live to your art as art.’ ‘Yes, I find it a very good thing. My hundred a year is worth a thousand to me, I assure you. But what a paltry little sum it must appear to you,’ she added, with a look of humour in her grey eyes. ‘What was it I once read about “spinsters and widows of one or two hundred a year, and other minute capitalists of the same kind?” I remember being very much amused with it. Do you not almost feel to require a magnifying-glass—mental, I mean—to enable you to see my hundred a year at all—you with your immense transactions, and your great income?’ ‘My dear Miss Ford,’ he expostulated, blushing as if to apologise for having such a large income when she had such a very small one, ‘pardon me; I ought never to have alluded——’ Sara laughed with hearty enjoyment. ‘Do not look so distressed,’ she said. ‘When I think how frightened I was at the countess’s account of you, and how I quaked when I saw her bringing you up to me yesterday, and then realise your goodness—why should you not ask how much money I have, and why should I not tell you that I have a hundred a year? I think there is such an immense amount of false delicacy wasted upon such matters.’ ‘Yet I know that you would not think of asking me what my income is,’ said Falkenberg, composedly. ‘There is a difference between a great financier and a “minute capitalist” like myself. Have you some plan for turning my hundred a year into two?’ she added, laughing. ‘No; I was innocent of wishing to speculate with your money. I was only anxious to know that you were not obliged to speculate with your brains.’ ‘No; I have been most fortunate, I consider, in that respect. When I first went to Elberthal I was certainly seriously puzzled to arrange my affairs, from a poverty of means, not an _embarras de richesses_. You see—I daresay you can bend your comprehension to the fact—it _was_ a little difficult to make a hundred a year pay for board and lodging for two, and for my lessons as well.’ ‘It must have been impossible,’ exclaimed Falkenberg, looking so shocked that Sara laughed again gleefully. ‘I am sure I could “harrow you up,” as the Americans say, if I were to relate some of Ellen’s and my contrivances at that time. We both were inspired with a Spartan resolution not to get into debt if we had to starve for it.’ ‘I cannot conceive how you lived,’ he said, in a voice which had actual pain in it. ‘How can you laugh at it? It is shocking. What were your friends doing to allow——’