and where the income of a year is often devoted to dispel the ennui of a
single day? India, with poverty, is the direst of all penal settlements.
In the bush, in the wilds of New Zealand, in the far-away islands of the
Pacific, you have the free air and healthful breezes of heaven. You can
bathe without having an alligator for your companion, and lie down on
the grass without a cobra on your carotid; but, in India, life stands
always face to face with death, and death in some hideous form."

"How you terrify me!" cried she, in a voice of intense emotion.

"I don't want to terrify, I want to warn. If it were ever my fate to
have a marriageable daughter, and some petty magistrate--some small
district judge of Bengal--asked her for a wife, I'd say to my girl, 'Go
and be a farm servant in New Caledonia. Milk cows, rear lambs, wash,
scrub, toil for your daily bread in some land where poverty is not
deemed the 'plague;' but don't encounter life in a society where to be
poor is to be despicable--where narrow means are a stigma of disgrace.'"

"Joseph says nothing of all this. He writes like one well contented with
his lot, and very hopeful for the future."

"Hasn't your niece, some ten or twelve thousand pounds?"

"Fifteen."

"Well, he presses the investment on which he asks a loan, just as any
other roguish speculator would, that's all."

"Oh, don't say that, Mr. Calvert Joseph is not a rogue."

"Men are rogues according to their capacity. The clever fellows do not
need roguery, and achieve success just because they are stronger and
better than their neighbours; but I don't want to talk of Loyd; every
consideration of the present case can be entertained without him."

"How can that be, if he is to be her husband?"

"Ah! If--if. My dear old friend, when and if comes into any question, the
wisest way is not to debate it, for the simple reason that applying our
logic to what is merely imaginary is very like putting a superstructure
of masonry over a house of cards. Besides, if we roust talk with a
hypothesis, I'll put mine, 'Must she of necessity marry this man, if he
insists on it?'"

"Of course; and the more, that she loves him."

"Loves him! Have I not told you that you are mistaken there? He
entrapped her at first into a half admission of caring for him, and,
partly from a sense of honour, and partly from obstinacy, she adheres
to it But she does so just the way people cling to a religion, because
nobody has e