"Oh, Conrad!" cried his wife, letting the water from the urn overflow the teapot in her astonishment; "you can't mean that! Part with my ponies?" "My dear love, how often do you drive them in a twelvemonth?" "Not very often, perhaps. I have felt rather nervous driving lately--carts and great waggon-loads of hay come out upon one so suddenly from cross-roads. I don't think the waggoners would care a bit if one were killed. But I am very fond of my gray ponies. They are so pretty. They have quite Arabian heads. Colonel Carteret says so, and he has been in Arabia." "But, my dear Pamela, do you think it worth while keeping a pair of ponies because they are pretty, and because Colonel Carteret, who knows about as much of a horse as I do of a megalosaurus says they have Arabian heads? Have you ever calculated what those ponies cost you?" "No, Conrad; I should hate myself if I were always calculating the cost of things." "Yes, that's all very well in the abstract. But if you are inclined to waste money, it's just as well to know how much you are wasting. Those ponies are costing you at the least one hundred and fifty pounds a year, for you could manage with a man less in the stables if you hadn't got them." "That's a good deal of money certainly," said Mrs. Winstanley, who hated driving, and had only driven her ponies because other people in her position drove ponies, and she felt it was a right thing to do. Still the idea of parting with anything that appertained to her state wounded her deeply. "I can't see why we should worry ourselves about the cost of the stables," she said; "they have gone on in the same way ever since I was married. Why should things be different now?" "Don't you see that you have the future to consider, Pamela. This handsome income which you are spending so lavishly----" "Edward never accused me of extravagance," interjected Mrs. Winstanley tearfully, "except in lace. He did hint that I was a little extravagant in lace." "This fine income is to be reduced seven years hence to fifteen hundred a year, an income upon which--with mine added to it--you could not expect to be able to carry on life decently in such a house as this. So you see, Pamela, unless we contrive between us to put by a considerable sum of money before your daughter's majority, we shall be obliged to leave the Abbey House, and live in a much smaller way than we are living now." "Leave the Abbey House!" cried Mrs. Winstanley with a horrified look. "Conrad, I have lived in this house ever since I was married." "Am I not aware of that, my dear love? But, all the same, you would have to let this place, and live in a much smaller house, if you had only fifteen hundred a year to live upon." "It would be too humiliating! At the end of one's life. I should never survive such a degradation." "It may be prevented if we exercise reasonable economy during the next seven years."