keep those buttons, and
was to have had them in his own care; but before that, all of them were
lost save two. My parents, as I call them from their wonderful goodness,
kinder than the ones who have turned me on the world (unless themselves
went out of it), resolved to have my white coat done up grandly, when
I grew too big for it, and to lay it by in lavender; and knowing of a
great man in the gold-lace trade, as far away as Scarborough, they sent
it by a fishing-smack to him, with people whom they knew thoroughly.
That was the last of it ever known here. The man swore a manifest that
he never saw it, and threatened them with libel; and the smack was
condemned, and all her hands impressed, because of some trifle she
happened to carry; and nobody knows any more of it. But two of the
buttons had fallen off, and good mother had put them by, to give a last
finish to the coat herself; and when I grew up, and had to go to sea
at night, they were turned into a pair of ear-rings. There, now, Miss
Anerley, I have not been long, and you know all about it."

"How very lonesome it must be for you," said Mary, with a gentle gaze,
which, coming from such lovely eyes, went straight into his heart, "to
have no one belonging to you by right, and to seem to belong to nobody!
I am sure I can not tell whatever I should do without any father, or
mother, or uncle, or even a cousin to be certain of."

"All the ladies seem to think that it is rather hard upon me," Robin
answered, with an excellent effort at a sigh; "but I do my very best
to get on without them. And one thing that helps me most of all is when
kind ladies, who have good hearts, allow me to talk to them as if I had
a sister. This makes me forget what I am sometimes."

"You never should try to forget what you are. Everybody in the world
speaks well of you. Even that cruel Lieutenant Carroway can not help
admiring you. And if you have taken to free trade, what else could you
do, when you had no friends, and even your coat was stolen?"

"High-minded people take that view of it, I know. But I do not pretend
to any such excuse. I took to free trade for the sake of my friends--to
support the old couple who have been so good to me."

"That is better still; it shows such good principle. My uncle Popplewell
has studied the subject of what they call 'political economy,' and he
says that the country requires free trade, and the only way to get it is
to go on so that the government mus