“Miss Edwards, make out Mrs. Staines’s account, if you please.”

Miss Edwards was a good while making it out; but it was ready at last.  He thrust it into his pocket, without daring to look at it there; but he went into Verrey’s, and asked for a cup of coffee, and perused the document.

The principal items were as follows:—­

May 4.  Re-shaping and repairing elegant lace mantle, 1 8
Chip bonnet, feather, and flowers . . . . 4 4
May 20.  Making and trimming blue silk dress—­material
part found . . . . . . . . . . . 19 19
Five yards rich blue silk to match. . . . 4 2
June 1.  Polonaise and jacket trimmed with lace—­
material part found . . . . . . . . 17 17
June 8.  One black silk dress, handsomely trimmed
with jet guipure and lace . . . . . . 49 18

A few shreds and fragments of finery, bought at odd times, swelled the bill to L99 11s. 6d.—­not to terrify the female mind with three figures.

And let no unsophisticated young lady imagine that the trimmings, which constituted three-fourths of this bill, were worth anything.  The word “lace,” in Madame Cie’s bill, invariably meant machine-made trash, worth tenpence a yard, but charged eighteen shillings a yard for one pennyworth of work in putting it on.  Where real lace was used, Madame Cie always let her customers know it.  Miss Lucas’s bill for this year contained the two following little items:—­

     Rich gros de cecile polonaise and jacket to match,
       trimmed with Chantilly lace and valenciennes . . . 68 5
     Superb robe de chambre, richly trimmed with skunk fur. 40 0

The customer found the stuff; viz., two shawls.  Carolina found the nasty little pole-cats, and got twenty-four shillings for them; Madame Cie found the rest.

But Christopher Staines had not Miss Lucas’s bill to compare his wife’s with.  He could only compare the latter with their income, and with male notions of common sense and reason.

He went home, and into his studio, and sat down on his hard beech chair; he looked round on his books and his work, and then, for the first time, remembered how long and how patiently he had toiled for every hundred pounds he had made; and he laid the evidences of his wife’s profusion and deceit by the side of those signs of painful industry and self-denial, and his soul filled with bitterness.  “Deceit! deceit!”

Mrs. Staines heard he was in the house, and came to know about the trial.  She came hurriedly in, and caught him with his head on the table, in an attitude of prostration, quite new to him; he raised his head directly he heard her, and revealed a face, pale, stern, and wretched.

“Oh! what is the matter now?” said she.

“The matter is what it has always been, if I could only have seen it.  You have deceived me, and disgraced yourself.  Look at those bills.”