Three thousand pounds!  The sum was continually sounding in her ears like the cry of a screech owl.  The very ripple of the river flowing so peacefully under the blue summer sky seemed to repeat the words.  Three thousand pounds!  ‘Is it much?’ she wondered, having no standard of comparison.  ’Is it very much more than my grandmother will expect me to have spent in the time?  Will it trouble her to have to pay those bills?  Will she be very angry?’

These were questions which Lesbia kept asking herself, in every pause of her frivolous existence; in such a pause as this, for instance, while the people round her were standing breathless, open-mouthed, gazing after the boats.  She did not care a straw for the boats, who won, or who lost the race.  It was all a hollow mockery.  Indeed it seemed just now that the only real thing in life was those accursed bills, which would have to be paid somehow.

She had told Lady Maulevrier nothing about them as yet.  She had allowed herself to be advised by Lady Kirkbank, and she had taken time to think.  But thought had given her no help.  The days were gliding onward, and Lady Maulevrier would have to be told.

She meditated perplexedly about her grandmother’s income.  She had never heard the extent of it, but had taken for granted that Lady Maulevrier was rich.  Would three thousand pounds make a great inroad on that income?  Would it be a year’s income?—­half a year’s?  Lesbia had no idea.  Life at Fellside was carried on in an elegant manner—­with considerable luxury in house and garden—­a luxury of flowers, a lavish expenditure of labour.  Yet the expenditure of Lady Maulevrier’s existence, spent always on the same spot, must be as nothing to the money spent in such a life as Lady Kirkbank’s, which involved the keeping up of three or four houses, and costly journeys to and fro, and incessant change of attire.

No doubt Lady Maulevrier had saved money; yes, she must have saved thousands during her long seclusion, Lesbia argued.  Her grandmother had told her that she was to look upon herself as an heiress.  This could only mean that Lady Maulevrier had a fortune to leave her; and this being so, what could it matter if she had anticipated some of her portion?  And yet there was in her heart of hearts a terrible fear of that stern dowager, of the cold scorn in those splendid eyes when she should stand revealed in all her foolishness, her selfish, mindless, vain extravagances.  She, who had never been reproved, shrank with a sickly dread from the idea of reproof.  And to be told that her career as a fashionable beauty had been a failure!  That would be the bitterest pang of all.

Soon came luncheon, and Heidseck, and then an afternoon which was gayer than the morning had been, inasmuch as every one babbled and laughed more after luncheon.  And then there was five o’clock tea on deck, under the striped Japanese awning, to the jingle of banjos, enlivened by the wit of black-faced minstrels, amidst wherries and canoes and gondolas, and ponderous houseboats, and snorting launches, crowding the sides of the sunlit river, in full view of the crowd yonder in front of the Red Lion, and here on this nearer bank, and all along either shore, fringing the green meadows with a gaudy border of smartly-dressed humanity.