y I please. What
good would it be to me if you could not all share it? Besides, I do not
want to be gossiped about and stared at, as is the lot of most young
women who happen to be heiresses. I am your orphan niece--that is all
that the outside world need know. What does it matter which of us really
owns the money?"

"There are very few people of your opinion, my dear," said her uncle.
"But you are a good, kind, generous girl, and we are more grateful to
you than we can say. And now, shall I talk to this young man? Have you
asked him any questions?"

"Yes. I do not think that we need reject him because he has no
references, uncle."

"Very well, Elizabeth. I quite agree with you. But, on the whole, we
won't mention the fact of his having no references to the rest of the
family."

"Just what I was about to say, Uncle Alfred."

Thereupon she betook herself to the house, and Mr. Heron proceeded to
the bench on the cliff, where he held a long and apparently satisfactory
colloquy with his visitor. And at the end of the conversation it was
decided that Mr. John Stretton, as he called himself, should give three
or four hours daily of his valuable time to the instruction of the more
youthful members of the Heron family.

CHAPTER XVII.

PERCIVAL'S HOLIDAY.

"Hey for the South, the sunny South!" said Percival Heron, striding into
his friend Vivian's room with a lighted cigar between his teeth and a
letter in his hand. "I'm off to Italy to-morrow."

"I wish to Heaven that I were off, too!" returned Rupert, leaning back
in a lounging-chair with a look of lazy discontent. "The fogs last all
the year round in London. This is May; I don't know why I am in town at
all."

"Nor I," said his friend, briskly. "Especially when you have the cash to
take you out of town as often as you like, and whenever you like, while
I have to wait on the tender mercies of publishers and editors before I
can put fifty pounds in my pocket and go for a holiday."

"You're in luck just now, then, I am to understand?"

"Very much so. Look at that, my boy." And he flourished a piece of thin
paper in Vivian's face. "A cheque for a hundred. I am going to squander
it on railway lines as soon as possible."

"You are going to join your family?"

"Yes, I am going to join my family. What a sweetly domestic sound! I
don't care a rap for my family. I am going to see the woman I love best
in the world, and, if she were not in Italy, I doubt wheth