This was the fact that from having been in easy circumstances they were now very poor.
When Godfrey Radmore had gone out of their lives there had been a great, perhaps even then a false, air of prosperity over them all.

John Tosswill was a man who had always made bad investments; but in that far-off time, "before the War," living was so cheap, wages were so low, the children were all still so young, that he and Janet had managed very well.
Only Betty knew the scrimping and the saving Jack, at Oxford, and Tom, at Winchester, now entailed on the part of those who lived at Old Place.
Why, she herself counted every penny with anxious care, and the stupid, kindly folk who asked, just a trifle censoriously, why she wasn't "doing something," now that "every career is open to a girl, especially to one who did so well in the War," would perhaps have felt a little ashamed had they discovered that she was housemaid, parlourmaid, often cook, to a large and not always easily pleased family.

They never had a visitor to stay now--they simply couldn't afford it--and she hated the thought of Godfrey, himself now so unnaturally prosperous, coming back to such an altered state of things.
Besides, that was not all.

Betty covered her face with her hands, and slow, bitter, reluctant tears began to ooze through her fingers.

She had tried not to think of Godfrey and of his coming, these last two or three days.