d. Ten months earlier the amount it stood for had
represented the depths of penury; but her standard of values had changed
in the interval, and now visions of wealth lurked in every flourish of
the pen. As she continued to gaze at it, she felt the glitter of the
visions mounting to her brain, and after a while she lifted the lid of
the desk and slipped the magic formula out of sight. It was easier to
think without those five figures dancing before her eyes; and she had a
great deal of thinking to do before she slept.

She opened her cheque-book, and plunged into such anxious calculations as
had prolonged her vigil at Bellomont on the night when she had decided to
marry Percy Gryce. Poverty simplifies book-keeping, and her financial
situation was easier to ascertain than it had been then; but she had not
yet learned the control of money, and during her transient phase of
luxury at the Emporium she had slipped back into habits of extravagance
which still impaired her slender balance. A careful examination of her
cheque-book, and of the unpaid bills in her desk, showed that, when the
latter had been settled, she would have barely enough to live on for the
next three or four months; and even after that, if she were to continue
her present way of living, without earning any additional money, all
incidental expenses must be reduced to the vanishing point. She hid her
eyes with a shudder, beholding herself at the entrance of that
ever-narrowing perspective down which she had seen Miss Silverton's dowdy
figure take its despondent way.

It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty that she
turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper
empoverishment--of an inner destitution compared to which outward
conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed miserable to be
poor--to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle-age, leading by dreary
degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption in the dingy
communal existence of the boarding-house. But there was something more
miserable still--it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of
being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the
years. That was the feeling which possessed her now--the feeling of being
something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface
of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self
could cling before the awful flood submerged them. An