All that he could do was to take more than his part in domestic trifles, such as most men would have scorned, and to relieve his wife as far as possible of the children, often at the cost of his writing.  He bore the brunt of many a trial of which she was scarcely aware—­ slights from the harsh vulgar, and compassion from the kind vulgar; and the proud self-assertion was gone which had hardened him to all such stings.  To his lot fell the misery of weighing and balancing what comforts could best be cut off without positive injury to his wife and little ones.  To consider whether an empty house should be repaired for a doubtful tenant, to make the venture, and have it rejected, was a severe vexation, when the expense trenched on absolute necessaries, and hardly less trying was it to be forced to accept the rent of the House Beautiful, knowing how ill it could be spared; and yet, that without it he must lapse into the hopeless abyss of debt.  Moreover, there was

     The terrible heart thrill
     To have no power of giving

to some of the poor who had learnt to look to the Terrace in his grandmother’s time, and meals were curtailed, that those in greater need might not be left quite unaided.

Nor was this the only cause for which James underwent actual stern privation.  The reign of bad cookery was over.  Charlotte, if unmethodical, was delicately neat; and though she kept them waiting for their dinner, always served it up with the precision of past prosperity.  Cheap cookery and cottage economy were the study, and the results were pronounced admirable; but the master was the dispenser; and when a modicum of meat was to make nourishing a mountain of rice, or an ocean of broth, it would occur to him, as he helped Isabel, that the piece de resistance would hardly hold out for the kitchen devourers.  He would take the recipe at its word, and dine on the surrounding structure; and in spite of the cottage economy, he was nearly as hungry after dinner as before it, and people began to say that he had never recovered his looks since his illness.  These daily petty acts of self-denial and self-restraint had begun to tame his spirit and open his eyes in a manner that neither precept nor example had yet effected.

Charlotte had imbibed to the full the spirit of patient exertion which pervaded the house.  Mrs. Martha had told her she was a foolish girl, and would be tired of the place in a fortnight; but when she did not see her tired, she would often rush in after her two mistresses were shut up for the evening, scold Charlotte for her want of method, and finish all that was left undone, while Charlotte went up to the nursery to release her mistress.  As to novels and sentiment, they had gone after Sir Hubert; and though Charlotte was what Martha expressively called ‘fairly run off her feet,’ she had never looked better nor happier.  Her mistress treated her like a friend; she doted on the children, and the cook was