“What did he want?” he asked, remembering that he was not supposed to know.

“The bulb,” she answered.

“And you would not sell it?”

“No.”

She had come from the doorstep now to pull up some weeds he had overlooked.

“I can’t understand you, Julia,” he said resting on his hoe, and speaking as much in sorrow as in anger.  “You seem to have so little sense of honour—­women so seldom have—­but I should have thought that you would have had a lesson on the necessity, the obligation of paying debts.  When you come to think of the efforts we are making to pay those debts, how I am straining every nerve, giving almost the whole of my income, doing without everything but the barest necessaries, without some things that are necessaries in my state of health, what your mother is doing, how she has given up her home, her husband, to live almost on charity in her son-in-law’s house.  When you think of all that, I say, and of what your sisters have done, it does seem strange that you should grudge this bulb, simply and solely because it was given you by some people for whom you care nothing.”

Julia agreed; she never saw the purpose of contradicting when conviction was out of the question.  “It does seem strange,” she said; “but there is one comfort, the worst of the debts will be cleared off by the end of the year.  Uncle William knows that and has arranged for it in his own mind; I really think it would be almost a pity to disturb the business plans of any one so exact.”

“Are we,” the Captain returned scornfully, “to pinch and save to the end of the year?  Am I to do without the few comforts that might make life tolerable?  Am I to work like a farm labourer and live like one till then, because you choose to keep this bulb?”

Julia thought it was very probable things would go on as they were for some time, but she did not say so; she only said, “I am sorry you find it so trying.”

“Trying!” her father said, and stopped, as if he found the word and most others very inadequate.  “After all, it does not much matter,” he remarked in a tone of gloomy resignation.  “I shan’t be here, in any one’s way, much longer; there is not the least chance that I shall live till the end of the year, and when I am gone you can do what you please, what you must, with your bulb.  I own I should like to see you a little more comfortable and better off now.  I hate to have you doing servant’s work and going shabby as you have to.  I should like you to be decently dressed, taking your proper place in society, but if you think it right to go on as you are and to keep your bulb, of course I have nothing to say.”