"There's nothing like business," he said to Mrs. Day.

She was seated in his private counting-room on the upper floor of the big
shop--it was half a dozen shops joined into one now. To reach that room
she had to pass through an ante-room full of entering clerks, busy at
their desks. They lifted their heads from their quill-driving to look at
the poor woman as she went by. She went with hanging head, her thick
widow's veil over her face, the thought in her mind, "Perhaps among the
poor clerks that collection of six shillings and ninepence had been made."
Perhaps one of the chilblain-fingered girls behind the counters down below
had been the "Sympathiser" to whom she had been indebted for a shilling.

She was humbled to the earth. It was so she would have described her
condition, as she walked to her interview with George Boult. If she had
been told that her heart, on the contrary, was filled with pride, and
beating high with rebellion, and that it was just the want of humility
within her, who yet contrived to present a humble bearing, which made
everything so unnecessarily painful, she would not have believed.

When, seated opposite to him at the small square leather-covered
writing-table in the draper's counting-house, she turned back her veil, he
noticed at once the ravages which grief and shame and anxiety had made in
her face. He was quick to notice, because, practical, hard-working,
hard-headed widower as he was, he had an eye for female beauty, and the
handsome dark face of his friend's wife--the woman who, in the days of her
haughtiness, had turned her back on him and kept him at arm's length--he
had unwillingly admired.

The face of Lydia Day now was that of a woman who had been plump but was