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'I am sorry to have turned out such a "problem child" after all.'

There was silence. A great discouragement had set in; it was almost as if the two women had played their last card. They shrank together into a collective huddle again, and Mary looked away out of the farther window where the night was setting in, a redness upon the walls having turned into a livid grey, and Mr. Harding senior seeming to have become a little forbidding in his faded brown frame.

The old lady evidently experienced great difficulty in finding any words at all. But at last she said, tremulous and slow, 'There is nothing I can say. You know all the hopes we had placed in you; but what is the use of saying that. It is of course a reproach, and the last thing I wish to do is to reproach you. We will do all we can, your sisters and I, to make things a little easier, to the extent of our ability.'

'I know you will,' he muttered.

'What you said about a loan is a very difficult matter, René. In fact, I have hardly any available funds. Outside of my annuity, what have I? Let me see, I might be able to scrape together, oh, a matter of five hundred pounds. Of what use would that be to you?'