you? Fourteen and threepence only to make
up."

"Fifteen!" said Gordon, quickly.

She put the figures down on a slip of paper
and added them up.

"Yes, you are right," she then said: "how
pleasant to have a clear-headed man at one's
elbow! Ah! my dear husband, her good papa,
had such a head for figures! I learnt of him,"
she said, and she squinted again.

"But four and ninepence is not a pound,"
Gordon said, with a good-natured court-martial
kind of air. "Now, Laura, get on with the
rest."

"I have it all!" cried the mother, speaking
very rapidly, and with the pleasantest manner
of successful advocacy possible; "you gave a
shilling to that poor woman with the baby,
don't you remember? and threepence to the
crossing-sweeper, and Annie had two new
brooms; and they were four shillings, and you
have been cheated out of ten shillings change,
and I know now where it was, it was at the
glove shop where you gave them a sovereign,
and they didn't give you back the half with the
silver. I am almost sure it was there, though
I couldn't swear it, but it must have been, for I
have made up all the rest, and that is just even
money."

"I know nothing about it," cried Laura, and
burst into tears.

"Goose!" said her mother, and slapped her
hand as if in play, but taking care to slap it
pretty hard when she was about it.

Gordon looked at his young wife with a long
steady look. "Put the books away, Laura,"
he then said, a little gloomily, and sighed, and
sat all the evening after with his chin in his
hand, looking into the fire and weaving unpleasant
fancies from the flames.

"Who is the fellow, and what the deuce does
he want?" asked Gordon, angrily. This was
the next day, Sunday, when he and Laura,
accompanied as of course by the mother, were
going to church; on the road whither he had
been in a manner forced to take notice of a
swarthy, shabby, ill-conditioned looking man,
who had followed and crossed and met and
recrossed and followed them again, till he
seemed like a seedy manner of will-o'-the-
wisp, set out on the London pavement for a
diversion of domicile, "Who is the fellow, and
what does he want? He seemed to know you,
Laura."

"That man we just met with the green-cut-
away?" asked Mrs. Broughton, quickly. "Well,
do you know I saw him follow us in a very odd
manner, and wondered if he knew you.
Perhaps he is one of your volunteer men, Gordon,
for we don't know him, Laura and I."

"My volunteer men, indeed! Good Heavens,
Mrs. Broughton, are my men pickpockets?"

"But he looked at you, dear."

"He looked at both of you hard enough,
confound his impudence!" said Gordon, testily;
and so went into the church, not in the fittest
mood for devout exercise.

A cloud had come over Laura. Her husband
could not define either its shape or its origin,
he was only conscious of its existence. Instead
of being the loving, tender-hearted creature of
former days, she had become gloomy and almost
morose, with a sullen manner, half angry, half
terrified, towards her mother, and a shrinking
withdrawal from himself, inexpressibly painful
to witness. She would sit for hours doing
nothing; neither working nor reading; simply
staring out of the window in a vague abstraction,
or looking into the fire, with the tears dropping
silently from her eyes. She only spoke when
she was spoken to, and then she started as if
awakened out of a sleep, and as often as not
answered wide of the mark as if her wits were
wool-gathering, as her mother said they were.
She refused to keep house, too, any longer,
alleging her inability to make her accounts
come right, and refusing Gordon's offers to
help her through; and as her mother was
always at hand, and was a first-rate manager,
Gordon turned over the military chest and the
commissariat to her, until such time as Laura
should return to her right mind, which he firmly
believed she had lost. He did not gain much
by the change. For he found that Mrs.
Broughton's clearly kept and cleanly written
columns always added up to rather more than
Laura's girlish sprawls and blotches had done;
and that the housekeeping had risen with a
bound, on an average two pounds a week. And
yet with no better or richer mode of living as
the visible cause. But what could be done?
How was he to know that salmon was only
eighteenpence the pound when it was marked
in the book as three shillings? "Fish varies
from day to day, and it was very unfortunate
indeed that we, Laura and I, chose the dear
day when you say it was so cheap down in
Parliament-street the day before, or after, I
forget which now. And as for brooms and
brushes, no, dear boy, they don't burn them for
firewood— you are so funny, Gordon!— or boil
the bristles into soup; they are a little
extravagant in them, I confess, but then, you see, what
a beautiful house you have in consequence,
and how delightfully clean! However, there
are the items set down correctly, one by one,
and if you can point out to me where we can
save, I am sure we will; won't we, Laura
love?"

But Gordon couldn't point out the specially
offending items; and if he did, those were the
very things, you dear stupid old thing, that
were absolutely indispensable— might as well
do without bread or boots! or that were
singularly cheap, or singularly small in quantity—
just the very thing of all not to be interfered
with, and that couldn't be cut down, or lessened,
or altered in any way. So Gordon gave up
contesting the point; and not being suspicious,
however rigid, accepted the rise in his household
expenses as rigtiteous and inevitable,
however mysterious.

He cared more about Laura's strange state
of mind and uncomfortable behaviour; but here,