Lady Helena began to be alarmed. Nobody knew better than her ladyship that the _prestige_ of aristocracy rested ultimately upon wealth, and that she could no more keep up her station without a good income than her strength without food. It had been a capital error of John Stanburne's from the beginning, not to consult his wife on every detail of his money transactions. She had always been perfectly prudent in not letting current expenses go beyond income, although, as they had only one child, there appeared to be no necessity for saving. She would have advised him well if he had invited her to advise him; but though he had always told her, with truth, that their income was four thousand a-year, he had not told her the history of the capital sum from which this income had, in consequence of some devices of his own, been drawn so unfailingly. The restoration of Wenderholme had been a very costly undertaking indeed. The whole outlay upon it John Stanburne had never dared to calculate; but we, who have no reason for that nervous abstinence from terrible totals, know that during the years immediately succeeding the great fire, he did not, in the restoration and adornment of his beautiful home, spend less than twenty-seven thousand pounds. The result, no doubt, was worth even so large an outlay as this; nor was the sum in itself very wildly extravagant, when one reflects that one of the Sootythorn cotton-spinners laid out fully as much on an ugly new house about half a mile beyond Chesnut Hill. But it diminished John Stanburne's funded property by more than one-half, and it therefore became necessary to invest the remainder more productively, to keep his income up to its old level.