“Why, it is from Mrs. Burnett!”—­pouncing on it and tearing it open.  “What shall I do?” she almost screamed as she read it.  “I am afraid I shall never get there in time.  What o’clock is it?—­my watch is never right.  Half-past twelve, and luncheon is at half-past one.  Oh, I must manage it!  Read that, dear.—­Jane!  Jane! bring me some hot water immediately, and come help me to dress.—­What is the cab fare to Park Terrace?  Eighteenpence?—­it can’t be so much.  Just lend me a shilling; you can take it out of the ten pounds you are to pay me next week.”  And she flew out of the room.

“Mrs. Liddell sat down with a sigh, and read the note which caused this excitement: 

“DEAR MRS. LIDDELL,—­Do help me in a dilemma!  We have a box for Miss St. Germaine’s benefit matinee to-morrow, and Lady Alice Mordaunt wants to come with Fanny and Bea.  You know she is not out yet.  Now I am engaged to go with Florence to Lady McLean’s garden party at Twickenham.  So may I depend on you to come and chaperon them?  If it were my own girls only, they could go with Ormonde or any one.  But Lady Alice is to be escorted to our house by that incarnation of propriety, Mr. Errington; so they must have a chaperon.  I therefore depend on you.  Luncheon at 1.30.  Do not fail.  Ever yours affectionately. 
                                                    E. BURNETT.”

Mrs. Liddell folded up the epistle and placed it in its envelope; then she sat musing.  How cruel it would be to break this butterfly on the wheel of bitter circumstance!  It would be irrational, she thought, “to expect the strength that could submit to and endure the inevitable from her.  She will at once suffer more and less than my Katie.  Small exterior things will sting Ada and make her miserable.  As long as Katherine’s heart is satisfied all else can be borne; but her conditions are more difficult.  Heigho! for material ills there is nothing so intolerable as debt.”  She rose and went to her room with the vague intention of doing some of the hundred and one things which needed doing, one more than another, as was usual in her busy life, but somehow the uncertainty and anxiety oppressing her heart made her incapable of continued action; she was always breaking off to think—­and the more she thought, the more uneasy she grew.  If she had worked out the thin vein of invention and observation which gained her her humble literary success, one source of income was gone—­a source on which she had reckoned too surely.  Then she had not anticipated that her daughter-in-law would be so expensive an inmate.  Self-denial was a thing incomprehensible to her.  As long as she took care of her clothes, and refrained from buying the very expensive garments her soul longed for, she considered herself most exemplary.  As for the smaller savings of omnibus and cabs not absolutely needful, she rarely thought of such matters, or, if she did, it made her frightfully cross, and urged her to many spiteful and contemptuous remarks on girls who have the strength of a horse, and do not care what horrid places they tramp through:  so that she never was able to lighten the household burdens by a farthing beyond the very small amount she had originally agreed to contribute toward them.