Her Faithful Knight — page 73: what you’re looking at

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

Ways and Means. _ 69 say that Phyllis was sadly changed would be to under- state the case; these few weeks of sorrow and suffering had transformed a light-hearted, willful little beauty of nineteen into a worn and saddened woman, who might from her looks have been fully ten years older. Sleep was not to be thought of by Dorothy that night. She had much, very much, to arrange for the morrow. Hers was always the managing brain of the household, for Phyllis liked to have everything arranged for her, and Cresswell, beyond a limpet-like fidelity, possessed few marked characteristics of any kind. So that Dorothy, placed too early in a position of absolute authority, had been led to exaggerate her own firmness of character, and to confuse strength of feeling with strength of will. One great trouble loomed darkly before her—the ques- tion of money. It was impossible not to see that Phyllis required most careful nursing, nourishing diet, and the best medical skill procurable. Failing these, in her state of physical and mental prostration, there seemed little likelihood that she would preserve her life and reason through the trial which lay before her. And Dorothy had no money at all. The rent of number one, Lockhart Cottages, was but ten shillings a week, and the patient Cresswell was per- fectly willing to work without wages. For the past eigh- teen months Dorothy had been very busy executing hand-painted cards and album pages for a city firm, and regularly once a week she had taken her way to the neighborhood of Smithfield in order to deliver a bulky parcel of work, and receive in return from five-and-twenty to five-and-thirty shillings, according to the low rate of pay given for that class of art work. Recently, how- ever, the demand for hand-painted figures and flowers had dropped, and, to her dismay, Miss Knight had EOmIGdoOo cS (E@)