“How much was the stuff a yard?” Lady Maria inquired.

“Sevenpence.”

“How many yards did you need?”

“Two.  It would have cost one and twopence, you see.  And I really could get on without it.”

Lady Maria put up her lorgnette and looked at her protegee with an interest which bordered on affection, it was so enjoyable to her epicurean old mind.

“I didn’t suspect it was as bad as that, Emily,” she said.  “I should never have dreamed it.  You managed to do yourself with such astonishing decency.  You were actually nice—­always.”

“I was very much poorer than anyone knew,” said Emily.  “People don’t like one’s troubles.  And when one is earning one’s living as I was, one must be agreeable, you know.  It would never do to seem tiresome.”

“There’s cleverness in realising that fact,” said Lady Maria.  “You were always the most cheerful creature.  That was one of the reasons Walderhurst admired you.”

The future marchioness blushed all over.  Lady Maria saw even her neck itself blush, and it amused her ladyship greatly.  She was intensely edified by the fact that Emily could be made to blush by the mere mention of her mature fiance’s name.

“She’s in such a state of mind about the man that she’s delightful,” was the old woman’s internal reflection; “I believe she’s in love with him, as if she was a nurse-maid and he was a butcher’s boy.”

“You see,” Emily went on in her nice, confiding way (one of the most surprising privileges of her new position was that it made it possible for her to confide in old Lady Maria), “it was not only the living from day to day that made one anxious, it was the Future!” (Lady Maria knew that the word began in this case with a capital letter.) “No one knows what the Future is to poor women.  One knows that one must get older, and one may not keep well, and if one could not be active and in good spirits, if one could not run about on errands, and things fell off, what could one do?  It takes hard work, Lady Maria, to keep up even the tiniest nice little room and the plainest presentable wardrobe, if one isn’t clever.  If I had been clever it would have been quite different, I dare say.  I have been so frightened sometimes in the middle of the night, when I wakened and thought about living to be sixty-five, that I have lain and shaken all over.  You see,” her blush had so far disappeared that she looked for the moment pale at the memory, “I had nobody—­nobody.”

“And now you are going to be the Marchioness of Walderhurst,” remarked Lady Maria.

Emily’s hands, which rested on her knee, wrung themselves together.

“That is what it seems impossible to believe,” she said, “or to be grateful enough for to—­to—­” and she blushed all over again.

“Say ’James’,” put in Lady Maria, with a sinful if amiable sense of comedy; “you will have to get accustomed to thinking of him as ‘James’ sometimes, at all events.”