The Argosy — page 260: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

memes ss Ae Rebri Qi Quy, APRIL, 1887, LADY, |}GRACE. BY MRS. HENRY WOOD, AUTHOR OF “EAST LYNNE." Ca CHAPTER VII. WITH SIR WILLIAM CHANT. N the handsome drawing-room of their town residence in Berkeley Square, sat the Dean of Denham and Lady Grace Baumgarten. It was a fine evening in April; the dinner-hour was approaching, and they were awaiting a guest: an old friend whom the Dean had met in the street unexpectedly that day, and invited. Years have elapsed, and the Dean, approaching fifty now, 1s more portly than he was wont to be; but Lady Grace carries her age well, and looks not a day older than the period a woman never confesses to having passed—five-and-thirty. But in the Dean’s face there is a look of anxious care: what can the flourishing Dean of Denham have to trouble 427? A great deal more than the world at large suspected. Gifted with an aristocratic wife, and she with aristocratic tastes and habits, the Dean had fallen long and long ago into a more expensive rate of living than his means permitted. Embarrassment followed, as a necessary consequence ; trifling enough at first, and easily put off— not done away with, but deferred. But the plan does not,answer ; it is something like the nails in the horse-shoe, which doubled as they went on; and Dr. Baumgarten had now attained to a height of per- plexity in his pecuniary affairs, not frequently reached by a dignitary of the Church. Half the labour of his later life had been to hide it from Lady Grace, and he had in a great measure succeeded. She could not avoid knowing that they were in debt, but she had no conception to what extent, and debt is rather a fashionable complaint. She also found that the Dean invariably ran short of ready money ; but that is not uncommon either. In one sense of the word, the debts which had gathered about them might be put down to the score of Lady Grace. At the death VOL, XLIII. R comnmicooolks (CO An