ng at any moment, except a
semi-miraculous windfall, to keep a man going, the crisis is very
serious. And it was no wonder that Mr. May was anxious to drive his son
into accepting any possible appointment, and that he occasionally railed
unreasonably at his family. Unless a hundred pounds or so fell down from
the skies within the next ten days, he saw nothing before him but ruin.
This, it is needless to say, is very far from being a comfortable
position. The _sourde_ agitation, excitement, feverish hope and fear of
the sufferer might well affect his temper. If he could not get a hundred
pounds within ten days, he did not know what he was to do.

And nobody could say (he thought to himself) that he was an expensive
man; he had no expensive habits. He liked good living, it is true, and a
glass of good wine, but this amount of regard for the table does not
ruin men. He liked books also, but he did not buy them, contenting
himself with such as the library could afford, and those which he could
obtain by the reviews he wrote for the Church Magazines. How then was it
that he never could get rid of that rapidly maturing bill? He could not
tell. Keeping out of debt is one thing, and getting rid of it when you
have once taken its yoke upon your neck is another. His money, when he
had any, "slipped through his fingers," as people say. When James's
remittance or any other piece of good fortune gave him enough to pay
that hundred pounds without borrowing elsewhere, he borrowed elsewhere
all the same. It was a mysterious fatality, from which he seemed unable
to escape. In such circumstances a crisis must come sooner or later, and
it appeared to him that now at least, after many hairbreadth escapes,
the crisis had come.

What was he to do? There was no chance, alas! of money from James, and
even if Reginald accepted the chaplaincy, and was willing at once to
come to his father's aid, there was no hope that he would have anything
for some time--for chaplains incomes are not, any more than other
people's, generally paid in advance. He leaned back in his chair and
went over again, for the hundredth time, the list of all the people he
could borrow from, or who would "back" a bill for him, and he was still
employed in this melancholy and hopeless enumeration, when a low knock
came to the door, and a maid-of-all-work, pushing it open, thrust in a
homely little man in a dusty-brown coat, who put up a hand to his
forehead as he came in with