n very young
at the date of her marriage, and her fortune was moderate enough, for
the moneyed strength of her grandfather and father had gone to found a
family and support a baronetage. Still, she had been accustomed to carry
herself, after she became Mrs. Carey, not in an obtrusive and offensive
manner, but in a quiet, well-bred way, as one who had been undeniably
better born and bred than her neighbours. Indeed, under any
circumstances she would have been a reserved woman, who would, in homely
parlance, have kept herself to herself.

This was the woman who, with an absence of any sense of proportion, and
an equal lack of humour, sometimes to be found in women of her class and
character, together with an excess of mingled fiery zeal and feverish
apprehension, hidden under a quiet exterior, took her measures on the
very day after the bank's failure. These measures made a thorough
exposure of the conclusion which she had arrived at, and subjected
herself and the whole family to immediate privations, for which they
were unprepared. They were injurious as well as useless and uncalled
for, and had a ludicrous side. Acting for Mr. Carey, she dismissed the
coachman and the gardener, paying them their month's wages which were
unearned. She let the valuable horses take their chance of casual
grooming and feeding, till they were sold off. She left the garden at
the most critical time of the year, as the old gardener said with tears
in his eyes, when the young vegetables were only coming into use, and
the whole fruit would be lost unless it were properly seen to. The wood
pigeons would have all the later seeds springing in the beds, and the
place on which he had bestowed so much time and labour would lie waste,
instead of providing a considerable part of the food of the household in
summer and autumn. "But there was never no sense in them ladies like
missus, no more in their sparing than in their spending." At one fell
swoop she dismissed her own maid, the cook, and the parlour-maid,
retaining only a young table-maid to "do" for the family.

Mrs. Carey had hitherto been an indulgent mother, but all at once she
told the scandalized university dandy and failure, Cyril, that he must
brush his own boots and help his schoolboy brothers to clean the knives,
if he were not satisfied with what a maid-of-all-work could accomplish
in these departments.

As for Ella and Phyllis, looking on aghast at the wholesale destruction
of what the