their poor resources with an uncertain contingent, whose continuance he
was not able to secure, or even dared to promise.

At the present moment, however, it was not anxiety as to their own
affairs that occupied the mind of Annie Melville, near enough as that
might have lain; it was the unhappy condition in which the imprudence of
a school-friend--almost her only friend--had involved herself by her
hasty marriage with a man who, up to the present moment, had shown no
faculty for helping himself or the wife he had involved in his fate, and
who did not know where or by what means to procure even the bread of
which they were in immediate want.

Now Annie had never had to suffer hunger, and the idea that her
companion from childhood should be exposed to such a fate was what she
could not bear. Yet, for any way out of it she could see, it would have
to be borne. She might possibly, by herself going without, have given
her a good piece of bread; but then she would certainly share it with
her foolish husband, and there would be little satisfaction in that!
They had already arrived at a stage in their downward progress when not
gold, or even silver, but bare copper, was lacking as the equivalent for
the bread that could but keep them alive until the next rousing of the
hunger that even now lay across their threshold. And how could she, in
her all but absolute poverty, do anything? Her mother was but one pace
or so from the same goal, and would, as a mother must, interfere to
prevent her useless postponement of the inevitable. It was clear she
could do nothing--and yet she could ill consent that it should be so.

When her father almost suddenly left them alone, Annie was already
acting as assistant in the Girls' High School--but, alas! without any
recognition of her services by even a promise of coming payment. She