quaking care for one's own
welfare which caused Wilkins the butcher to send in his quarter's bill
before it was due to Colonel Russell, and have the debt discharged
within the hour. In like manner, Honeyman the grocer felt bound
delicately to intimate to the Careys that he declined to give the family
more than a week's credit. He was answered in a formally polite note
from Mrs. Carey to the effect that she had not intended to ask for any
longer credit thenceforth, but from that date she would pay ready money.
These offensively defensive acts and vulgar tokens that times were
changed got wind, and were discussed in awed, indignant whispers by the
mass of Wilkins's and Honeyman's fellow-townsmen.

There was little need to remind the poor Careys of their altered
circumstances, since it was in the Bank House that some of the spasmodic
sweeping reforms referred to had at once been practised by Mrs. Carey.
She had always been the ruling spirit in the house, and people now said
openly that it would have been well for everybody if she had been the
ruling spirit in the bank also. She was a woman with locally
aristocratic connections, of a more tangible kind than what constituted
the Millars' shadowy link with the county. Her brother was Sir Charles
Luxmore of Headley Grange, and her nephew had allied himself to the
peerage by marrying an Honourable Victoria Brackenridge. All the greater
the glaring recklessness and insolence of Honeyman to take the word into
his own mouth and refuse the Careys credit. At the same time Sir
Charles's place was nearer the town of Nenthorn than that of Redcross,
and he did not deal with Redcross tradesmen unless at election times. As
for his daughter-in-law, the Honourable Victoria, she came so seldom to
see her aunt-in-law that her face could not be said to be known in
Redcross streets, where she never entered even the "fancy shop" which
the other county ladies patronized occasionally in search of missing
shades of silks or wools.

Mrs. Carey had stooped considerably when she became the wife of Mr.
Carey of the bank, though the bank was nominally his own, and the Careys
were a highly respectable family of old standing in Redcross. When it
came to that, there had only been two generations of the Luxmores at
Headley Grange, and the original baronet's rise to the honours of
knighthood and a baronetage was due to his success and favour in high
places as a fashionable physician. Mrs. Carey had not bee