upon her that the reproach had been
taken away from the memory of Tollington Moon. Henceforth his niece Miss
Quincey would be a gentlewoman at large. At the same time it struck her
that after all poor Juliana did not look so very old.

"Very well then," said she, "if I were you I should put on that nice silk
blouse in the evenings."

CHAPTER XI

Dr. Cautley Sends in his Bill

"I wonder," Mrs. Moon observed suddenly one morning, "if that man is
going to let his bill run on to the day of judgment?"

The Old Lady had not even distantly alluded to Dr. Cautley for as
many as ten months. After the great day of what she called Juliana's
"resignation" she seemed to have tacitly agreed that since Juliana had
spared her dream she would spare Juliana's. Did she not know, she too,
that the dream is the reality? As Miss Quincey, gentlewoman at large,
Juliana had a perfect right to set up a dream of her own; as to whether
she was able to afford the luxury, Juliana was the best judge. Her
present wonder, then, had no malignant reference; it was simply wrung
from her by inexorable economy. Juliana's supplies were calculated to
last a year; as it was the winter season that they had lately weathered,
she was rather more than three-quarters of the way through her slender
resources, and it behoved them to look out for bills ahead. And Mrs.
Moon had always suspected that young man, not only of a passion for
mare's-nesting, but of deliberately and systematically keeping back
his accounts that he might revel in a larger haul.

The remark, falling with a shock all the greater for a silence of ten
months, had the effect of driving Juliana out of the room. Out of the
room and out of the house, down High Street, where Hunter's shop was
already blossoming in another spring; up Park Street and past the long
wall of St. Sidwell's, till she found herself alone in Primrose Hill
Park.

The young day was so glorious that Miss Quincey had some thoughts of
climbing Primrose Hill and sitting on the top; but after twenty yards or
so of it she abandoned the attempt. For the last few months her heart had
been the seat of certain curious sensations, so remarkably like those she
had experienced in the summer that she took them for the same, and
sternly resolved to suppress their existence by ignoring it. That, she
understood, was the right treatment for hysteria.

But this morning Miss Quincey's heart protested so violently against her
notion