’Adela, this is positively shocking!  It seems incredible I never thought such things could happen.  No wonder you looked white when you went out of church.  How little I imagined!  But you know you can come here at any moment.  You can sleep with me, or we’ll have another bed put up in the room.  Oh, dear; oh, dear!  It will take me a long time to understand it.  Your husband could not possibly object to your living here till he found you a suitable home.  What will Alfred say?  Oh, you must certainly come here.  I shan’t have a moment’s’ rest if you go away somewhere whilst things are in this dreadful state.’

‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ Adela replied with. a reassuring smile.  ’It might very well have happened that we had nothing at all, not even the hundred pounds; but a wife can’t run away for reasons of that kind—­can she, Letty?’

Letty gazed with her eyes of loving pity, and sighed, ’I suppose not, dear.’

Adela sat with them for only a few minutes more.  She did not feel able to chat at length on a crisis such as this, and the tone of her mother’s sympathy was not soothing to her.  Mrs. Waltham had begun to put a handkerchief to her eyes.

‘You mustn’t take it to heart,’ Adela said as she bent and kissed her cheek.  ’You can’t think how little it troubles me—­on my own account.  Letty, I look to you to keep mother cheerful.  Only think what numbers of poor creatures would dance for joy if they had a hundred a year left them!  We must be philosophers, you see.  I couldn’t shed a tear if I tried ever so hard.  Good-bye, dear mother!’

Mrs. Waltham did not rise, but Letty followed her friend into the hall.  She had been very silent and undemonstrative; now she embraced Adela tenderly.  There was still something of the old diffidence in her manner, but the effect of her mother. hood was discernible.  Adela was childless—­a circumstance in itself provocative of a gentle sense of protection in Letty’s heart.

‘You’ll let us see you every day, darling?’

’As often as I can, Letty.  Don’t let mother get low-spirited.  There’s nothing to grieve about.’

Letty returned to the sitting-room; Mrs. Waltham was still pressing the handkerchief on this cheek and that alternately.

‘How wonderful she is!’ Letty exclaimed.  ’I feel as if I could never again fret over little troubles.’

‘Adela has a strong character,’ assented the mother with mournful pride.

Letty, unable to sit long without her baby, fetched it from the nurse’s arms.  The infant’s luncheon-hour had arrived, and the nourishment was still of Letty’s own providing.  It was strange to see on her face the slow triumph of this ineffable bliss over the grief occasioned by the recent conversation.  Mrs. Waltham had floated into a stream of talk.