lie is a very good match and he will be quite
comfortably off, and he is pleasant and good-looking and all that! Oh!
you have done very well for yourself, Denys, and you are not going to
prevent my having my chance."

Denys's cheeks were scarlet. She literally did not know what to say!

Had she made a good match? Had she done very well for herself? Such
a view of the case had never entered her head. She thought of what
Charlie's prospects had been when she first knew him on that long ago
visit to her grandmother.

Who would have said then that Charlie was likely to be comfortably
off? How well she remembered Gwyn Bailey's picnic, when Charlie had
told her that the positions he had hoped for were closed to him,
and that he had no money to enter a profession! She remembered the
hopeless ring of his voice as he had said, "now there's nothing."

No! she had not chosen Charlie for any such reason as Gertrude
suggested.

She was standing with her back to the scullery, and was quite unaware
that behind the half closed door Pattie was quietly peeling potatoes,
but her answer could scarcely have been different if she had known it.

"I wish you would not talk so, Gertrude," she said.

"Very likely," said Gertrude calmly, "people often do not care to hear
what is nevertheless quite true. And I mean to be pretty well off when
I get married, and not to have to scrape and think of every penny, and
wonder whether you can afford a new dress just directly you want it. I
think it's horrid, and I have always thought it horrid."

"I don't," said Denys, "it seems to me that we have been as happy at
home here as any family I know, even though we have had, as you call
it, to scrape and think of pennies, and manage our clothes and work
hard. I've liked it always and if I loved anyone I would not mind
being poor. Mother did not marry anybody rich and _she_ is happy!"

"Ah!" said Gertrude, "it is all very well for you to talk. You have
Love _and_ Money. And that's what I mean to have! So I shall go to
Whitecliff and get to know fresh people and see what turns up!"

"What about----" began Denys, but she did not finish her sentence. She
disliked putting names together, but her thoughts flew off to a Scotch
town, where a boy with a merry face and dark twinkling eyes, was
working his hardest as a bank-clerk. Reggie Alston had been Gertrude's
chum since they were children, and he had never made any secret of the
fact that Gertrude was the