Lanley compressed his lips slightly, but contented himself by merely lengthening the tail of a seven.

He said nothing more, but every time he found an error he gave a little shake of his head that went through her like a knife.
The task was a long one.

The light of the winter afternoon faded, and she lit the lamps before he finished.

At first he had tried not to be aware of revelations that the book made; but as he went on and he found he was obliged now and then to question her about payments and receipts, he saw that she was so utterly without any sense of privacy in the matter that his own decreased.
He had never thought of her as being particularly poor, not at least in the sense of worrying over every bill, but now when he saw the small margin between the amounts paid in and the amounts paid out, when he noticed how large a proportion of what she had she spent in free gifts and not in living expenses, he found himself facing something he could not tolerate.

He put his pen down carefully in the crease of the book, and rose to his feet.
"Mrs.Wayne," he said, "I must tell you something." "You're going to say, after all, that my sevens are like fours." "I'm going to say something worse--more inexcusable.