rself. He is a little awkward sometimes, I
confess; but only when he is looking at a thing from some other point
of view, and does not like to say you ought to have been looking at it
from the same. And you can't say he shuffles, for he never stops till
he has done his best to make you!--What have you been saying to him,
Hector?"

"Nothing but what I have told you; it's rather what I have not been
saying!" answered her brother. "He would have had me open out to him,
and I wouldn't. How could I! Whatever I said that pleased him, would
have looked as if I wanted to secure my situation! Hang it all! I have
a good mind to throw it up. How is a Graeme to serve under a bumpkin?"

"The man is not a bumpkin; he is a scholar and a poet!" said the lady.

"Pooh! pooh! What's a poet?"

"One that may or may not be as good a man of business as yourself when
it is required of him."

"Come, come! don't you turn against me, Kate! It's hard enough to bear
as it is!"

Miss Graeme made no reply. She was meditating all she knew of Donal, to
guide her to the something to which she was sure her brother had not
let him come; and presently she made him recount again all they had
said to each other.

"I tell you, Hector," she exclaimed, "you never made such a fool of
yourself in your life! If I know human nature, that man is different
from any other you have had to do with. It will take a woman, a better
woman than your sister, I confess, to understand him; but I see a
little farther into him than you do. He is a man who, never having had
money enough to learn the bad uses of it, and never having formed
habits it takes money to supply, having no ambition, living in books
not in places, and for pleasure having more at his command in himself
than the richest--he is a man who, I say, would find money an
impediment to his happiness, for he must have a sense of duty with
regard to it which would interfere with everything he liked best.
Besides, though he does not care a straw for the judgment of the world
where it differs from him, he would be sorry to seem to go against that
judgment where he agrees with it: scorning to marry any woman for her
money, he would not have the world think he had done so."

"Ah, Katey, there I have you! The world would entirely approve of his
doing that!"

"I will take a better position then:--he would not willingly seem to
have done a thing he himself despises. The man believes himself sent
into the world to