"Never mind now. Get it. Get all you can lay your hands on. Quick!"

Her purse was in the pocket hidden in the many folds of her silk dress.

There was not quite so much in it as she had reckoned; she slipped the sovereign and few shillings with trembling fingers into his hand.

"I could ask Bernard, and Bessie, William."

"No! I won't take their money," he said. "This will get me to London."

"To London?"

"I am going up by the mail."

"But why in this hurry?"

Not the prospect of the sudden journey, but the something secret and horribly unfamiliar in his manner frightened her. He came a step further into the hall and picking up a dark m.u.f.fler from a chair, wound it round his neck. She saw that his face was livid, and looked suddenly flabby, and that his hands were shaking.

"Business," he whispered. "Don't worry."

As he turned to the door, she laid a hand on his arm. "Something is wrong.

I have felt it all the evening. Tell me, have you had losses, William?"

He nodded, without looking at her. "That's about the tune of it."

"You should have told me."

"I've told you now. You'll hear about it soon enough."

She gripped his arm. "Don't go like this! Whatever it is, don't run away.

Is it very bad? Is it--" the word that stood for the worst business misfortune she could imagine, trembled and died on her lips--"is it _Failure_?"

He pulled his m.u.f.fler about his face, his hat lower upon his brow: "You've hit it," he said. "It's that."

Her hand slid from his coat-sleeve, he slipped through the half-open door, and shuffled down the three white steps which led to the silent street.

Then, as white, half-stupefied, she watched him, he turned and climbed the steps again and stood beside her.

"You had better go to George Boult," he said. "Boult will tell you what to do. Are you listening? Go to Boult."

"But aren't you coming back to-morrow, William? You can't leave us like this! You must come back!"

He was going down the steps again. There was a moon clear in a frosty sky.

How white the steps shone! For all her life she remembered the big, unwieldy figure of her husband shuffling down them.

"I don't know what my movements may be. Just at present they are uncertain." Arrived on the pavement he turned his miserable, furtive eyes on her as she stood in the open door, the brightly-lit hall of home behind her. "Shut the door," he said with something of his old pa.s.sionate irritability of manner. "I don't want all the world to know I'm going away to-night. Shut the door!"

She obeyed him, as ever when he used that tone to her, with nervous haste.

William Day waited a moment to hear the bolts slipping into place. It was a duty he performed himself every night of his life as he went up to bed.

The door was bolted with him on the wrong side of it, now. Never, he knew, in all the years to come would he turn the lock of security on the sleeping house and shuffle upstairs, bed-candle in hand, to warmth and comfort and peaceful sleep again.

Mrs. Day, going back into the hall, came to a standstill beneath the hanging lamp, trying to collect her thoughts, trying to realise, but totally unable to do so, that ruin had come upon her home, her children, herself. Ruin which she had seen visit the homes of other people, devastate them; but whose shadow she had never imagined falling on the fortunes of her own.

On the William Days; so well-to-do; so respected in the place; who had their annual dance last night, all the nicest, most desirable people of the town present. No one's dance was so nicely managed, so spirited, so successful as theirs.

She was actually thinking of the dance as she stood there, dazed, in the gas-lit hall. They would never give another New Year's dance.

William, with all his faults, was never mean. "Don't spoil the ship for a ha'po'rth of tar," was a favourite motto of his. She had ever thought it a proverb both pleasant and wise. She was not an extravagant woman, but she also liked to have things well done, and had no sympathy with cheese-paring ways. The house was well and handsomely furnished, she and the children had plenty of dress, their table was an excellent one, all of them indulging in an amused contempt of the domestic economies of their friends. Servants stayed with them for years, and it was easy to fill their places when they left. They kept one more of them than was needed, for comfort's sake. She was a good mistress; he, for all his pa.s.sionate rating of his dependents at times, was a good master.

Was all this finished now? Was it possible? The old pleasant, natural order of things--the only order to which she had ever been accustomed.

Finished now?

And if so what would follow?

Furniture sale. Dust of strange feet in the familiar rooms. People she would never have dreamed of admitting there pulling about her carpets, poking her feather-beds, turning up their noses at the breakfast-room chair-covers which were shabby, there was no good in denying it; and with her not by to explain they preferred them so. No more expensive paint-boxes and toys for Franky; Bessie and darling Deleah in shabby hats; Bernard without pocket-money, made a banker's clerk, perhaps--she had heard her husband say bank-clerks had no prospects, poor beggars!

Bernard--her handsome Bernard to be a "poor beggar"--!

A sudden vertigo seized her: the hall was whirling round; she stretched a hand blindly for support, and pulled over an umbrella-stand which fell with a crash and clatter.

The girls and Bernard came running out. "What on earth are you doing, mama? Have you hurt yourself? What is it?"

She had subsided upon a hall-chair, her face was ghastly, all her strength seemed gone. "I felt faint. I am better," she got out, and looked strangely round upon them all. Her gaze wandered lingeringly from object to object in the hall as if she had never seen it before. She shivered violently with deadly cold. "I will go to bed," she said.

The children helped her upstairs. She leant on Bessie's arm, the arm of Deleah was round her waist. The stairway was broad, there was room for all three. Bernard stood on the mat below and watched with an anxious face.

"Sure I can't do anything, mother?" he kept saying.

They were all so fond of her, so frightened if for a moment she seemed to fail them. She could not get rid of them till they had undressed her and put her to bed. Until they themselves went to bed they kept coming back and peeping in at her. "Papa will be back soon; mind you send him for us if you feel at all ill," they adjured her.

"Mama, you are sure it is not because I worried you about Reggie Forcus?"

a contrite Bessie asked. "Because he is sure to come to-morrow--you think so, don't you?--and we shall make it all right, in spite of Sir Francis.

Promise not to worry, mama."

Twice in the night Deleah slipped from her own warm bed to stand, an anxious little figure, shivering in her nightgown, her dark curls streaming down her back, a suspensive ear to the keyhole of her mother's door. People fainted because they had heart disease. Of heart disease they also died. She dared not go in, because papa was there, but waited, trembling with cold and fear, until her mother's sigh rea.s.sured her.

In the morning the mistress of the house came down with a pale face and dark rings about her deeply-set large eyes. She could not smile, she could not eat, she hardly spoke, but she was better, she said.

The children would have to know; but she could not bring herself to tell them. That their father was not in the house they did not perceive, but put down his absence from the breakfast-table to the fact that he had over-slept himself.

A great fire blazed on the hearth. A stack of m.u.f.fins was being kept warm in a silver dish on a bra.s.s stand before it. Fish, and broiled kidneys were on the table; a ham, and a brawn, and a glazed tongue on the sideboard. Mrs. Day always drank coffee at her breakfast, Deleah liked cocoa, the rest took tea; all three were served.

Mrs. Day surveyed these signs of comfort and luxury with a numb feeling at her heart. All this, and such as this, would have to go. How would the children endure life without it. Was this lavish amount of food "extravagance"? she asked herself, for the first time. Was it possible she, with her well-filled table on which she had prided herself, had conduced to the misfortune? She was a woman whose conscience was very easily touched, and she began to blame herself. "But I never dreamed!" she said, "I never dreamed!"

Bessie could eat neither fish nor kidneys, that morning. "Mama, there was some game-pie left, last night. Mayn't I have some of it?"

The servant was rung for to bring the game-pie. "If there are any oyster patties we might have them in, mother," Bernard suggested.

The mother, sadly gazing, a.s.sented. Nothing would she have denied them, that morning--her poor children who were so soon to be deprived of game-pies and oysters for ever!

They were in the midst of breakfast, their voices a little subdued because mama was not well, yet with an enjoyable sense of freedom because papa, who was so often irritable at that meal, had not yet come down, when suddenly the door opened and without any announcement Mr. George Boult walked in.