m
lest his nephew might do something beneath a McPherson unless he was
prevented.

"How much have you now?--how much money, I mean?"

"Just one shilling; and Daisy has, ten. If Mrs. Smithers had not invited
us here, Heaven only knows what we should have done, for Daisy will not
stay at Stoneleigh; so we travel from place to place, and she manages
somehow," Archie said: and his uncle rejoined:

"And makes her name a by-word and a reproach, as I suppose you know."

"Daisy is my wife!" Archie replied, with a dignity for which his uncle
menially respected him.

Just then the last dinner-bell rang, and rising from his seat, John put
his hand first in his vest pocket and then into Archie's hand, where he
left a twenty-pound note, saying rapidly:

"You needn't tell _her_--your wife I mean, or mine, either. A man may do
as he likes occasionally."

They were walking toward the house, arm-in-arm, and Archie's step was
lighter, and his face brighter and handsomer than it had been in many a
day. Indeed, he was quite his old self as he entered the drawing room
and greeted his august aunt, who received him more graciously than, she
had his wife.

Just then Neil came in with Bessie, whom he took to his mother, saying:

"Look, mother, here is Bessie. Didn't I tell you she was a beauty?"

Then, as his mother merely inclined her head, he lifted the child in
his arms and held her close to the proud lips which touched the white
forehead coldly, while a frown darkened the lady's face, for
notwithstanding that Bessie was so young and Neil a mere boy, she
disapproved of the liking between them lest it should interfere with
Blanche. But Neil did not fancy Blanche, and he did like Bessie, and
took her in to dinner, holding her little hand while she skipped and
jumped at his side and looked up in his face with those great blue eyes
which moved him strangely now, and which in the after time were to
bewilder and intoxicate and awaken in him all the better impulses of his
nature and then become the sweetest and the saddest memory of his life.

"It is so nice to go to dinner with big people and have all you want to
eat, isn't it?" she said to him, as she settled herself in her chair and
adjusted her napkin with all the precision of a grown person.

"Of course it's nice," Neil replied, never dreaming what a real dinner
was to this child who had so often dined on a bit of bread, a few
shriveled grapes, a fig or two and some raisins, tryi