which had incapacitated her for several weeks.

Edward Henry and Nellie had taken advantage of her helplessness, then,
to force her to give up her barbaric cottage in Brougham Street and
share permanently the splendid comfort of their home. She existed
in their home like a philosophic prisoner-of-war at the court of
conquerors, behaving faultlessly, behaving magnanimously in the
melancholy grandeur of her fall, but never renouncing her soul's
secret independence, nor permitting herself to forget that she was on
foreign ground.

When Edward Henry looked at those yellow and seasoned fingers, which
by hard manual labour had kept herself and him in the young days of
his humble obscurity, and which during sixty years had not been idle
for more than six weeks in all, he grew almost apologetic for his
wealth.

They reminded him of the day when his total resources were five
pounds--won in a wager, and of the day when he drove proudly about
behind a mule collecting other people's rents, and of the glittering
days when he burst in on her from Llandudno with over a thousand
gold sovereigns in a hat-box--product of his first great picturesque
coup--imagining himself to be an English Jay Gould.

She had not blenched, even then. She had not blenched since. And she
never would blench. In spite of his gorgeous position and his unique
reputation, in spite of her well-concealed but notorious pride in
him, he still went in fear of that ageless woman, whose undaunted eye
always told him that he was still the lad Denry, and her inferior in
moral force. The curve of her thin lips seemed ever to be warning him