d lips. "The
house here is to be given up and the furniture sold immediately--of
course you know that. It will take all that he can spare after
discharging his share of the bank debts to keep Mrs. Russell and the
children. I am a useless sort of person--a blank in the world. I could
not nurse like Annie, or paint like Rose. I could not even be a
school-mistress like Bell Hewett. Supposing I were qualified I should
break down in a month. I was born in India, and spent the first five
years of my life there, so that I am idle and languid, without stamina
or moral courage; I am like the poor Bengalees, whom I can just
remember. There is nobody who will undertake to keep me in England,"
ended Fanny, with a short, hard laugh.

And Dora, thinking of Cyril Carey--still one of the unemployed, with his
old supercilious airs lost in the gait that was getting slouching, in
keeping with the clothes becoming shabbier and shabbier, and the
downcast, moody looks--could not find words with which to contradict
her.

Indeed, when Dora was betrayed into giving her mother a hint of that
"something," unsuspected by the seniors of the circle, which had been
between Cyril Carey and Fanny Russell, and rendered Fanny's destination
still more heartless and hateful, Mrs. Millar took an entirely
different view of the circumstances from that taken by her daughters,
and was both indignant and intolerant. "What presumption in Cyril
Carey!" broke out the gentle mother of marriageable daughters, full of
righteous wrath. "To dream of making up to a girl and perhaps engaging
her simple affections, with the danger of breaking her heart and
spoiling her prospects, when he had just failed to pass at college, and
had not so much as a calling--not to say an income, with which to keep a
wife! I shall think worse of him than I did before, after hearing this."

"But you forget, mother," remonstrated Dora, "that the bank was in
existence then. His father might have been able to do something for
Cyril."

"He was not going to live on the bank's capital and credit. There was
too much of that going on already with poor James Carey's encroaching,
dishonest relations and their friends. And I beg to tell you, Dora, that
a man who cannot help himself, but has to wait for his father to do
something for him, is a very poor match for any girl. Fanny Russell is
well rid of him. I have no doubt she will think so before she is many
years older--that is, if this is not all