that it shall be divided equally among us, even
to little May."

"I am sure it's very kind of them," said Bob with a touch of impatience
in his tone; "but I want to be up and able to work at it--to gather it
in and see it accumulate. I want to be a really _rich_ man."

"For shame, Robert," said Blanche, with just the faintest feeling of
disgust--the first she had ever experienced toward Bob. "If you talk
like that I shall leave you. I am disappointed in you; I should _never_
have suspected _you_ of being mercenary."

"Well, I am then," returned Bob, quite unabashed. "I _am_ mercenary, if
that means being anxious to be rich. And so would you be, Miss
Lascelles, if you had seen as much misery as I have; misery, too, which
could be cured by the judicious expenditure of comparatively trifling
sums of money. Only think how jolly it would be to go up to every poor
hungry man, woman, and child you met, clap a sovereign in their hands,
and say, `There, go and enjoy the luxury of a good unstinted meal for
once in your life.' But a rich man's power goes a great deal further
than that. If ever _I_ am rich I shall not be satisfied with the
bestowal of relief of such a very temporary kind as a solitary meal
amounts to; I shall hunt up some really deserving cases and put them in
the way of earning their own livings. _Real_ relief consists, to my
mind, of nothing short of the stretching out of a helping hand and
lifting some poor soul clean out of that miserable state where one's
very existence depends upon the fluctuating charity of one's fellow-
creatures. I've _seen_ it, and I know what it means. There's any
amount of real misery to be met with in the neighbourhood of the Docks,
ay, and all over London, for that matter, if one only chooses to keep
one's eyes open. Of course I know that many of the beggars and match-
sellers, and people of that kind are rank loafers, too idle to work even
when they have the chance--people who spend in drink every penny that's
given them--and in my opinion they richly deserve all the misery they
suffer. But there are plenty of others who would be only too happy to
work if they could; and _they_ are the people I should seek out and
help, the poor women and children, you know. It makes me fairly sick, I
give you my word, Miss Lascelles, when I think of the vast sums of money
that are squandered every year in ways which leave nothing to show for
the expenditure. Take gambling for instan