It is the fancy that swells your milliner's bill, the newly-invented trimmings, the complex and laborious combinations." "I will be dreadfully economical in future, Conrad. For the last year I have dressed to please you." "But what becomes of all these gowns?" asked the Captain, folding up the bill; "what do you do with them?" "They go out." "Out where? To the colonies?" "No, dear; they go out of fashion; and I give them to Pauline." "A sixty-guinea dress flung to your waiting-maid! The Duchess of Dovedale could not do things in better style." "I should be very sorry not to dress better than the Duchess," said Mrs. Winstanley, "she is always hideously dowdy. But a duchess can afford to dress as badly as she likes." "I see. Then it is we only who occupy the border-land of society who have to be careful. Well, my dear Pamela, I shall send Madame Theodore her cheque, and with your permission close her account; and, unless you receive some large accession of fortune I should recommend you not to reopen it." His wife gave a heart-breaking sigh. "I would sacrifice anything for your sake, Conrad," she said, "but I shall be a perfect horror, and you will hate me." "I fell in love with you, my dear, not with your gown." "But you fell in love with me in my gown, dear; and you don't know how different your feelings might have been if you had seen me in a gown cut by a country dressmaker." CHAPTER III. "With weary Days thou shalt be clothed and fed." Captain Winstanley never again alluded to the dressmaker's bill. He was too wise a man to reopen old wounds or to dwell upon small vexations. He had invested every penny that he could spare, leaving the smallest balance at his banker's compatible with respectability. He had to sell some railway shares in order to pay Madame Theodore. Happily the shares had gone up since his purchase of them, and he lost nothing by the transaction; but it galled him sorely to part with the money. It was as if an edifice that he had been toilfully raising, stone by stone, had begun to crumble under his hands. He knew not when or whence the next call might come. The time in which he had to save money was so short. Only six years, and the heiress would claim her estate, and Mrs. Winstanley would be left with the empty shell of her present position--the privilege of occupying a fine old Tudor mansion, with enormous stables, and fifteen acres of garden and shrubberies, and an annuity that would barely suffice to maintain existence in a third-rate London square.