oal.

The hoarse baying of the hungry wolves around the house had shaken the
pencil from her fingers--Siberian wolves they were, racing over the arid
deserts of debt, large and sharp-toothed, ever increasing in number and
ferocity, ready to tear the very door down. There are no wolves like
those debt sends against a house.

Every knock at the door, every strange footstep up the approach, every
letter that came, was like the gnawing and gnashing of savage teeth.

Iden could plant the potatoes and gossip at the stile, and put the
letters unopened on the mantelshelf--a pile of bills over his head where
he slept calmly after dinner. Iden could plant potatoes, and cut trusses
of hay, and go through _his_ work to appearance unmoved.

Amaryllis could not draw--she could not do it; her imagination refused
to see the idea; the more she concentrated her mind, the louder she
heard the ceaseless grinding and gnashing of teeth.

Potatoes can be planted and nails can be hammered, bill-hooks can be
wielded and faggots chopped, no matter what the inward care. The
ploughman is deeply in debt, poor fellow, but he can, and does, follow
the plough, and finds, perhaps, some solace in the dull monotony of his
labour. Clods cannot feel. A sensitive mind and vivid imagination--a
delicately-balanced organization, that almost lives on its ideas as
veritable food--cannot do like this. The poet, the artist, the author,
the thinker, cannot follow their plough; their work depends on a serene
mind.

But experience proves that they _do_ do their work under such
circumstances. They do; how greatly then they must be tortured, or for
what a length of time they must have suffered to become benumbed.

Amaryllis was young, and all her feelings unchecked of Time. She could
not sketch--that was a thing of useless paper and pencil; what was
wanted was money. She could not read, that was not real; what was wanted
was solid coin.

So the portfolio was thrust aside, neglected and covered with dust, but
she came every day to her flowers in the window-niche.

She had drawn up there in the bitter cold of February and March, without
a fire, disdainful of ease in the fulness of her generous hope. Her warm
young blood cared nothing for the cold, if only by enduring it she could
assist those whom she loved.

There were artists in the Flamma family in London who made what seemed
to her large incomes, yet whose names had never been seen in a newspaper
criticis