As she rose from the piano a footman came in with two letters on a salver—­bulky letters, such packages as Lesbia had never seen before.  She wondered what they could be.  She opened the thickest envelope first.  It was Seraphine’s bill—­such a bill, page after page on creamy Bath post, written in an elegant Italian hand by one of Seraphine’s young women.

Lesbia looked at it aghast with horror.  The total at the foot of the first page was appalling, ever so much more than she could have supposed the whole amount of her indebtedness; but the total went on increasing at the foot of every page, until at sight of the final figures Lesbia gave a wild shriek, like a wretched creature who has received a telegram announcing bitterest loss.

The final total was twelve hundred and ninety-three pounds seventeen and sixpence!

Thirteen hundred pounds for clothes in eight weeks!

No, the thing was a cheat, a mistake.  They had sent her somebody else’s bill.  She had not had half these things.

She read the first page, her heart beating violently as she pored over the figures, her eyes dim and clouded with the trouble of her brain.

Yes, there was her court dress.  The description was too minute to be mistaken; and the court dress, with feathers, and shoes, and gloves, and fan, came to a hundred and thirty pounds.  Then followed innumerable items.  The very simplest of her gowns cost five-and-twenty pounds—­frocks about which Seraphine had talked so carelessly, as if two or three more or less could make no difference.  Bonnets and hats, at five or seven guineas apiece, swelled the account.  Parasols and fans were of fabulous price, as it seemed to Lesbia; and the shoes and stockings to match her various gowns occurred again and again between the more important items, like the refrain of an old ballad.  All the useless and unnessary things which she had ordered, because she thought them pretty or because she was told they were fashionable, rose up against her in the figures of the bill, like the record of forgotten sins at the Day of Judgment.

She sank into a chair, pallid with consternation, and sat with the bill in her lap, turning the pages listlessly, and staring at the figures.

‘It cannot be so much,’ she cried to herself.  ’It must be added up wrong;’ and then she feebly tried to cast up a column; but arithmetic not being one of those accomplishments which Lady Maulevrier deemed necessary to a patrician beauty’s success in life, Lesbia’s education had been somewhat neglected upon this point, and she flung the bill from her in a rage, unable to hold the figures in her brain.

She opened the second envelope, her jeweller’s account.  At the very first item she gave another scream, fainter than the first, for her mind was getting hardened against such shocks.

’To re-setting a suite of amethysts, with forty-four finest Brazilian brilliants, three hundred and fifteen pounds.’