ow up her and her husband.
For years, without any precise information, but merely by instinct, she
had felt that England, beneath the surface, was not quite the island it
had been--and here was the awful proof.

She gazed at her husband, as a wife ought to gaze at her husband in a
crisis. His thoughts were much vaguer than hers, his thoughts about
money being always extremely vague.

"Suppose you went up to the City and saw Mr. What's-his-name?" she
suggested, meaning the signatory of the letter.

"_Me_!"

It was a cry of the soul aghast, a cry drawn out of him sharply, by a
most genuine cruel alarm. Him to go up to the City to interview a
solicitor! Why, the poor dear woman must be demented! He could not have
done it for a million pounds. The thought of it made him sick, raising
the whole of his lunch to his throat, as by some sinister magic.

She saw and translated the look on his face. It was a look of horror.
And at once she made excuses for him to herself. At once she said to
herself that it was no use pretending that her Henry was like other men.
He was not. He was a dreamer. He was, at times, amazingly peculiar. But
he was her Henry. In any other man than her Henry a hesitation to take
charge of his wife's financial affairs would have been ridiculous; it
would have been effeminate. But Henry was Henry. She was gradually
learning that truth. He was adorable; but he was Henry. With magnificent
strength of mind she collected herself.

"No," she said cheerfully. "As they're my shares, perhaps I'd better go.
Unless we _both_ go!" She encountered his eye again, and added quietly:
"No, I'll go alone."

He sighed his relief. He could not help sighing his relief.

And, after meticulously washing-up and straightening, she departed, and
Priam remained solitary with his ideas about married life and the fiscal
question.

Alice was assuredly the very mirror of discretion. Never, since that
unanswered query as to savings at the Grand Babylon, had she subjected
him to any inquisition concerning money. Never had she talked of her own
means, save in casual phrase now and then to assure him that there was
enough. She had indeed refused banknotes diffidently offered to her by
him, telling him to keep them by him till need of them arose. Never had
she discoursed of her own past life, nor led him on to discourse of his.
She was one of those women for whom neither the past nor the future
seems to exist--they are always so oc