It was well to laugh; merriment is the great digestive, and an unspeakable boon to the man capable of it in all but every situation; but what if _she_ also laughed, and not in the sympathetic way?
Worse still, what if she could _not_ laugh, but looked wretchedly embarrassed, confused, shamed?
That would be a crisis it needed some philosophy to contemplate.
For the present, common sense made it rigorously plain to him that the less he thought of these things, the better.

He had not a penny to spare.

Only by exercising an economy which in the old days would have appalled him, could he send his mother and sister an annual sum just sufficient to their needs.

He who scorned and loathed all kinds of parsimony had learnt to cut down his expenditure at every possible point.

He still smoked his pipe; he bought newspapers; he granted himself an excursion, of the cheapest, on fine Sundays; but these surely were necessities of life.