This must be called the third part of the story, if we may reckon the short commencing prologue as the first. The year had gone on to October, and that month was quickly passing.

The lapse of time, some three or four months, had not brought any change worth recording: people and things were in the main very much in the position that they had been: but a slight summary of progress must be given.

Bede Greatorex had been on the wing. In early August he went abroad with his wife, choosing Switzerland as his first halting-ground. Bede had proposed some place (if that could be found) less frequented by the English; and Mrs. Bede had retorted that if he wanted to vegetate in an outlandish desert, he might go to it alone. In the invariable kindness and consideration Bede observed to her, even to her whims, he yielded: and they went off in the commotional wake of a shoal of staring tourists, with another commotional shoal behind them.

Mr. Greatorex it was who had insisted on the holiday for Bede. "You are getting more incapable of hard work every day," he plainly said to him: "a rest will, I hope, restore you; and take it you must." Bede yielded. That he was very much in need of a change of some sort, he knew. And of rest also--if he could only get it. But the latter might be more hard to obtain than Mr. Greatorex suspected or imagined.

So they went to Switzerland first: Bede and his wife, and her maid Tallet. Bede thought the party would have been a vast deal more compact and comfortable without the lady\'s-maid, not to speak of the additional expense, and he gently hinted as much. The hint was quite lost on Mrs. Bede, who took not the smallest notice of it. In point of fact, that lady (besides being incorrigibly idle, never doing an earthly thing for herself) had absolute need of artistic aid in the matter of making-up: face and shape and hair and attire alike requiring daily renovation. From Switzerland they went rushing about to other places, not at all necessary to note, and got back home the middle of October, after rather more than two months\' absence; being followed by nearly a fourgon of fashions from Paris: for that seductive capital had been their last resting-place, and Mrs. Bede had found its magazins as seductive as itself. Bede winced at the cheques he had to give.

Mr. Greatorex started with alarm when he saw his son. They got home at night, having come up by the tidal train from Folkestone, which had been somewhat delayed in consequence of the boat\'s rough passage. During their absence, it had been the quietest and happiest home imaginable: Mr. Greatorex, Annabel Channing, and the little girl forming it; Frank Greatorex having holiday as well as Bede. For visitors they had Henry William Ollivera and Roland Yorke, one or the other dropping in to tea twice or thrice a week. Mr. Greatorex was a very father to Annabel; and Miss Jane, subjected to regularity and desirable influences only, was on her best behaviour. The old lawyer, in the happy quiet, the relief conferred by the absence of noise and Mrs. Bede, thought the good old times must be coming back again.

All three were sitting together in the drawing-room when Bede and his wife got in. The chandelier\'s rays flashed full on Bede\'s face, and Mr. Greatorex started. Far from his son\'s having derived benefit from the prolonged tour, he looked worse than ever; his cheeks hollow and hectic, his face altogether worn. Perhaps for the first time it struck Mr. Greatorex, as he glanced from one to the other, that she likewise looked thin and worn, with restless eyes and hollow cheeks, hectic also. But in the hectic there was this difference: Bede\'s was natural, hers was put on. What would they have been without the rouge?

Bede said he was better. When Mr. Greatorex spoke seriously to him on the following morning, recommending that there should be a consultation, Bede laughed. He declared that the rest from business had done him an immense deal of good. Thin? Oh of course he was thin. So was Louisa--did Mr. Greatorex not notice it?--Tallet was the same, for the matter of that: they had gone whirling about from place to place, a little too fast, he supposed, making a toil of pleasure. And then the dreadful sea passage!--of course they looked the worse last night, but they were both all right this morning.

So spoke Bede, and went to work with a will: really with some of his old energy. He appeared fresh and tolerably well after the night\'s rest; and Mr. Greatorex felt reassured.

Gerald Yorke was another who had taken holiday. Gerald had managed to get an invitation to cruise in the Honourable Mr. Fuller\'s yacht; and Gerald, with two or three other invited guests, went careering off in it for the space of six weeks. Before starting, he had fully accomplished his reviewing work with regard to Hamish Channing\'s book--but that can be left until later. Gerald enjoyed himself amazingly. The yacht put into foreign ports on occasion, and they got a few days\' land cruise. The honourable owner treated his friends right royally, and Gerald had not felt so much at ease since he was a boy. By a slice of luck, which Gerald hardly believed in at the time, he had induced Vincent Yorke to lend him fifty pounds before starting, and he thought himself laudably generous in dividing this with his wife.

"Now mind, Winny," he said to her on the morning of his departure, "I shall be away about five weeks. It can\'t take you five pounds a week to live and pay rent, so I shall expect you to have a good sum in hand when I get back. I\'ll drop you a letter now and then, but you\'ll not be able to write to me, as we shall be moving about from place to place just as the wind or mood takes us."

Therefore, on the score of his wife and children, Gerald was entirely at ease; and he quite expected, after his charge to Winny, that she would have something like eight or ten pounds left of the twenty-five; at least, that she ought to have. He was out of reach of creditors too; the future he did not allow to trouble him (he never did), and Gerald gave himself wholly up to the enjoyment of the present.

Little did Gerald Yorke suspect, as he leaned over the side of the yacht in seductive indolence, smoking his cigar and sipping his iced Burgundy, that poor Winny\'s money had come to an end before the second week was over. It might not have cost him a single moment\'s care if he had known it, for Gerald was one upon whom no earthly person\'s trouble made the smallest impression, unless it touched him personally. Effectually out of the way himself, Winny might just have done as she best could. Gerald would have wished he was at hand to tell her she deserved a shaking for her folly, and dismissed the matter from his mind.

The way the money went so soon, was this. Gerald\'s man-servant in chambers, just as glad as his master to get a respite from troublesome creditors, who went well nigh to wear his patience out, informed one of that ill-used body of men where Mr. Gerald Yorke had gone, on the very day following the departure--"Cruising over the sea in a lord\'s yacht to foreign parts, and likely to be away till winter." Of course this struck the applicant dumb. He happened to know that Gerald Yorke had a wife and family in town, and he set himself forthwith to learn their address; which he found not very difficult of accomplishment. His own debt was not a very heavy one, rather short of six pounds. Down he went, demanded an interview with Mrs. Yorke, and so scared her senses away by insisting upon instant payment there and then, that Winny handed out the money. Other creditors got to know of this; they went down too, and insisted upon the same prompt payment on their score. Winny had many virtues no doubt, but there was one she could certainly not boast of--courage. In all that related to debt and its attendant annoyances, she was timid as a fawn. To be pressed for an account and not pay it if she had the money in her possession, was simply impossible to Winifred Yorke. But this I think has been hinted at before. When the last fraction of the twenty-five pounds had left her (in a payment of four pounds ten to a stern-looking, but by no means abusive man). Winny burst into tears: saying aloud she did not expect her husband home for weeks, did not know where to write to him, and had not a sixpence left for herself and her poor little children. Upon that the man put the half-sovereign back into Mrs. Yorke\'s hand without a word, and departed.

So there was Winny, literally without a sixpence, save for this ten shillings, and Gerald not quite two weeks gone. But for Hamish Channing and his wife, she might really have starved; most certainly she would have been turned out of doors; for the landlady, nearly tired of Mr. Gerald Yorke\'s uncertain finances, had never kept her. Miss Cook said she could not afford to let rooms and get no rent; and no doubt that was true. Away went Winny with her grief and helplessness to Mrs. Channing. It was an awkward dilemma, an embarrassing appeal, and Ellen Channing felt it as such. On the one hand there was this poor helpless woman, and her not much more helpless children: on the other, Ellen was aware that Hamish had already aided her far more extensively than he could afford.

Oh, it was true. Many and many a little luxury (Gerald would have called it a necessary) that Hamish required in his failing health--for it had begun to fail--did he debar himself of for the sake of Gerald Yorke\'s wife and children. His heart ached for them. He took not the smallest pleasure, he often walked where he ought to have rode, he would eat breed and cheese for his lunch, or a dry roll where he should have had a chop, that he might give the saved money to Mrs. Yorke. In those golden dreams of fame and fortune, when his book was approaching completion, and the realization of its returns had apparently been drawing very near (months ago now, it seemed to be, since they were dreamt out), Hamish had cherished a little delightful plot: of setting Gerald on his legs again anonymously--of putting him straight with the world, and perhaps something over, that he might see his way at least a little clearer towards a more satisfactory state of household matters for himself and Winny jointly. This had been frustrated through the book\'s being written down, as already partially told of, and a corner of the grief in Hamish Manning\'s weary heart was sighing itself out for Gerald\'s sake. Hamish said not a word of the disappointment to a living soul--we are speaking now in regard to Gerald--Ellen had been his sole confidant, and he did not allude to it even to her. To Hamish, it seemed that there was only the more necessity for helping Gerald, in administering to the necessities of his forsaken wife.

And Gerald\'s wife had invented a pleasant fable. As the weeks went on after Winny came to London, it was not possible but that Gerald should see someone must help her with money. Put to it for an excuse, one day that Gerald asked the question point blank, and not daring to say it was Hamish or Ellen Channing, Winny declared it was her mother. Gerald stared a little. Mrs. Eales lived somewhere down in Wales, and existed on an annuity of sixty pounds a-year. But though he wondered how the good old mère contrived to help Winny so much, or in fact at all, he inquired no farther. She might be reducing herself to a crust and a glass of water a day; might be, for aught he knew, forestalling her income wholesale; Gerald was complacently content to let it be so.

And thus matters had been going on: Winny in want always, and Hamish taxing himself and his needs to help her. In September, the office he served offered him a fortnight\'s holiday, thinking he looked as if he required it. Hamish thanked them, but declined. He had no spirits for taking holiday, and the helping of Gerald\'s family left him no funds for it.

And when Winny burst into Mrs. Channing\'s one afternoon, with this last confession, that she was utterly penniless, save for the half-sovereign the man threw back, and should be so until Gerald came home, weeks hence, telling it in the hearing of her three little girls, her face woe-begone, her tears and sobs fit to choke her, Ellen Channing felt annoyed and vexed. Mixed with her compassion for Gerald\'s wife, there was a feeling that they had already done more for her than they were justified in doing. Ellen would have liked the fortnight\'s holiday very much indeed on her own score. A suspicion had begun to dawn upon her that her husband was not so strong as he might be, and one morning she spoke to him. It was only the London heat that made him feel weak, Hamish answered, perhaps really thinking so. Very well, argued Ellen, then there was all the more necessity for getting out of it to the seaside for a change. And he would have been glad enough to take the change had funds allowed it. Considering that the small amounts of help incessantly applied to the need of Mrs. Gerald Yorke would have taken them to the seaside ever so many times over, Mrs. Channing had felt it. And to have this fresh demand made, when she had supposed Winny was safe for some weeks to come, to hear the avowal that she wanted money for everything--food and lodging and washing and sundries, did strike Mrs. Channing as being a little too much.

Ellen Channing had been, as Ellen Huntley, reared to liberality. She was large-hearted by nature, open-handed by habit. To refuse to continue to aid Mrs. Yorke in her helpless need, would have gone against her inclination, but to continue to supply her at any cost was almost equally so. What to do, and what Winny would do, she could not think. The first thing was, to take Winny\'s things off and comfort her for the rest of the day; the next was to send the children to Miss Nelly in the nurs............