draft for fifty pounds, his satisfaction was intense. The
sight of the money brought an itching to his fingers, a restlessness
about him generally. And yet it was not all that might have been
desired, only fifty pounds! he had been buoying himself up by vain
thoughts of how James this time, having been so long writing, would send
a larger sum, which would at once tide him over the Tozer business, and
on this account had been giving himself no trouble about it. Never
before had he been so _insouciant_, although never before had the risk
been so great. He had suffered so much about it last time, probably,
that was why he took it so easily now; or was it because his trust in
the chapter of accidents had grown greater since he was more dependent
on it? or because of the generally expanded sense of living in him which
made anxiety uncongenial anyhow? Whatever the cause was, this was the
effect. A momentary disappointment when he saw how little James's draft
was--then a sense of that semi-intoxication which comes upon a poor man
when a sum of money falls into his hands--gradually invaded his soul. He
tried to settle down to his writing, but did not feel equal to the
effort. It was too little for the purpose, he said to himself, for which
he wanted it; but it was enough to do a great many pleasant things with
otherwise. For the first time he had no urgent bills to swallow it up;
the very grocer, a long-suffering tradesman who made less fuss than the
others, and about whom Ursula made less fuss, had been pacified by a
payment on account of the Copperhead money, and thus had his mouth
stopped. Barring that bill, indeed, things were in a more comfortable
state than they had been for a long time in the May household; and
putting that out of account, James's money would have been the nearest
approach to luxury--reckoning luxury in its most simple form as money to
spend without any absolutely forestalling claim upon it--which Mr. May
had known for years. It is so seldom that poor people have this
delicious sense of a little, ever so little surplus! and it would be
hard to say how he could entertain the feeling that it was an overplus.
There was something of the fumes of desperation perhaps, and impending
fate in the lightness of heart which seized upon him. He could not keep
still over his writing. He got up at last, and put James's draft into
his pocket-book, and got his hat to go out. It was a fine morning, full
of that exhilaration