l the florist to send a few every
day?"

She leaned confidently toward her father: he seldom refused her anything,
and Mrs. Bart had taught her to plead with him when her own entreaties
failed.

Mr. Bart sat motionless, his gaze still fixed on the salmon, and his
lower jaw dropped; he looked even paler than usual, and his thin hair lay
in untidy streaks on his forehead. Suddenly he looked at his daughter and
laughed. The laugh was so strange that Lily coloured under it: she
disliked being ridiculed, and her father seemed to see something
ridiculous in the request. Perhaps he thought it foolish that she should
trouble him about such a trifle.

"Twelve dollars--twelve dollars a day for flowers? Oh, certainly, my
dear--give him an order for twelve hundred." He continued to laugh.

Mrs. Bart gave him a quick glance.

"You needn't wait, Poleworth--I will ring for you," she said to the
butler.

The butler withdrew with an air of silent disapproval, leaving the
remains of the CHAUFROIX on the sideboard.

"What is the matter, Hudson? Are you ill?" said Mrs. Bart severely.

She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making, and it
was odious to her that her husband should make a show of himself before
the servants.

"Are you ill?" she repeated.

"Ill?---- No, I'm ruined," he said.

Lily made a frightened sound, and Mrs. Bart rose to her feet.

"Ruined----?" she cried; but controlling herself instantly, she turned a
calm face to Lily.

"Shut the pantry door," she said.

Lily obeyed, and when she turned back into the room her father was
sitting with both elbows on the table, the plate of salmon between them,
and his head bowed on his hands.

Mrs. Bart stood over him with a white face which made her hair
unnaturally yellow. She looked at Lily as the latter approached: her look
was terrible, but her voice was modulated to a ghastly cheerfulness.

"Your father is not well--he doesn't know what he is saying. It is
nothing--but you had better go upstairs; and don't talk to the servants,"
she added.

Lily obeyed; she always obeyed when her mother spoke in that voice. She
had not been deceived by Mrs. Bart's words: she knew at once that they
were ruined. In the dark hours which followed, that awful fact
overshadowed even her father's slow and difficult dying. To his wife he
no longer counted: he had become extinct when he ceased to fulfil his
purpose, and she sat at his side with the provisional air