"I don't know what my movements may be. Just at present they are uncertain." Arrived on the pavement he turned his miserable, furtive eyes on her as she stood in the open door, the brightly-lit hall of home behind her. "Shut the door," he said with something of his old passionate irritability of manner. "I don't want all the world to know I'm going away to-night. Shut the door!"
She obeyed him, as ever when he used that tone to her, with nervous haste. William Day waited a moment to hear the bolts slipping into place. It was a duty he performed himself every night of his life as he went up to bed. The door was bolted with him on the wrong side of it, now. Never, he knew, in all the years to come would he turn the lock of security on the sleeping house and shuffle upstairs, bed-candle in hand, to warmth and comfort and peaceful sleep again.
Mrs. Day, going back into the hall, came to a standstill beneath the hanging lamp, trying to collect her thoughts, trying to realise, but totally unable to do so, that ruin had come upon her home, her children, herself. Ruin which she had seen visit the homes of other people, devastate them; but whose shadow she had never imagined falling on the fortunes of her own.
On the William Days; so well-to-do; so respected in the place; who had their annual dance last night, all the nicest, most desirable people of the town present. No one's dance was so nicely managed, so spirited, so successful as theirs.
She was actually thinking of the dance as she stood there, dazed, in the gas-lit hall. They would never give another New Year's dance.
William, with all his faults, was never mean. "Don't spoil the ship for a ha'po'rth of tar," was a favourite motto of his. She had ever thought it a proverb both pleasant and wise. She was not an extravagant woman, but she also liked to have things well done, and had no sympathy with cheese-paring ways. The house was well and handsomely furnished, she and the children had plenty of dress, their table was an excellent one, all of them indulging in an amused contempt of the domestic economies of their friends. Servants stayed with them for years, and it was easy to fill their places when they left. They kept one more of them than was needed, for comfort's sake. She was a good mistress; he, for all his passionate rating of his dependents at times, was a good master.