er to sell out again."

"She ought to look upon it as an investment; but if she won't, we must
find some other way, that's all."

A threat was contained in this sentence, and Joan knew, without asking,
what the threat was. In the course of his professional life, which now
extended over six or seven years, Ralph had saved, perhaps, three or
four hundred pounds. Considering the sacrifices he had made in order to
put by this sum it always amazed Joan to find that he used it to gamble
with, buying shares and selling them again, increasing it sometimes,
sometimes diminishing it, and always running the risk of losing every
penny of it in a day's disaster. But although she wondered, she could
not help loving him the better for his odd combination of Spartan
self-control and what appeared to her romantic and childish folly. Ralph
interested her more than any one else in the world, and she often broke
off in the middle of one of these economic discussions, in spite of
their gravity, to consider some fresh aspect of his character.

"I think you'd be foolish to risk your money on poor old Charles,"
she observed. "Fond as I am of him, he doesn't seem to me exactly
brilliant.... Besides, why should you be sacrificed?"

"My dear Joan," Ralph exclaimed, stretching himself out with a gesture
of impatience, "don't you see that we've all got to be sacrificed?
What's the use of denying it? What's the use of struggling against it?
So it always has been, so it always will be. We've got no money and we
never shall have any money. We shall just turn round in the mill every
day of our lives until we drop and die, worn out, as most people do,
when one comes to think of it."

Joan looked at him, opened her lips as if to speak, and closed them
again. Then she said, very tentatively:

"Aren't you happy, Ralph?"

"No. Are you? Perhaps I'm as happy as most people, though. God knows
whether I'm happy or not. What is happiness?"

He glanced with half a smile, in spite of his gloomy irritation, at his
sister. She looked, as usual, as if she were weighing one thing with
another, and balancing them together before she made up her mind.

"Happiness," she remarked at length enigmatically, rather as if she were
sampling the word, and then she paused. She paused for a considerable
space, as if she were considering happiness in all its bearings. "Hilda
was here to-day," she suddenly resumed, as if they had never mentioned
happiness. "She brought Bob