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"A hundred and thirty guineas, mother!"

For a minute Mrs. Ashurst made her no reply. Her thoughts were far away. She could scarcely realise the scene passing round her, though she had pictured it to herself a hundred times in a hundred different phases. Years ago--how many years ago it seemed!--she was delicate and fragile, and thought she should die before her husband, and she would lie awake for hours in the night, rehearsing her own death-bed, and thinking how she should tell James not to grieve after her, but to marry again, anybody except that Eleanor Shaw, the organist's daughter, and she should be sorry to think of that flighty minx going through the linen and china after she was gone. And now the time had really come, and he was going to be taken from her; he, her James, with his big brown eyes and long silky hair, and strong lithe figure, as she first remembered him--going to be taken from her now, and leave her an old woman, poor and lone and forlorn--and Mrs. Ashurst tried to stop the tears which rolled down her face, and to reply to her daughter's strange remark.