"Are we to go on like this for ever?"
"I hope we shan't go on so for a month. I wish you'd not talk so, Caroline."
"How am I to talk? You have been saying the same all along?"
"Well it's of no good your looking on the dark side of things. You are always doing it now." Caroline was silent for a few moments, when she suddenly lifted up her hands, and her voice broke into a passionate wail.
"Oh, if that money had been but settled on me, as Uncle Richard wished! This must be a judgment upon us for defying his last commands."
"Rubbish!" said Mark.
"Are we to go out in the street and beg?" she plaintively asked.
"Are you going to be a child? One must get a rub or two through life; Caroline. Barker has been down upon his beam-ends five or six times, just as much as we are, but it has always come right again."
She relapsed into a fit of weeping; half her hours, abed and up, were so spent. Mark had ceased either to soothe or reproach; he had tried both, but ineffectually; and now was fain to let her weep simply because he was helpless to prevent it. Mark Cray could not be unkind; he was not that; but he was hardly the right sort of husband for adversity. Shallow-minded, shallow-hearted, possessed of no depth of feeling, there seemed something wanting in him now. He did his best to cheer his wife; but the result was not satisfactory.
The fits of weeping would sometimes go on to hysterics; sometimes stopped just short of it. As this one stopped. Caroline suddenly roused herself and looked round wearily at the mantelpiece, as if there were a timepiece there, perhaps in momentary forgetfulness. Grosvenor Place had been rich in such; elegant bijoux, worth no end of money.