little ragged child he met, and felt that
Neil McPherson was a pretty good fellow after all.

At last the letter came, and Neil read it in the privacy of his room,
and, being alone with no one to hear, called his aunt a name which
sounded a little like swearing, and paced up and down the apartment with
the perspiration standing thickly around his white lips, and a feeling
at his heart as if he were not only bitterly disappointed but had also
been insulted by the offer made to him.

"An overseer in some cotton mills!--factories they call them there. Not
if I know myself!" he said. "_I_ stoop to that? Never! The old woman is
a fool," (this with an adjective), "and she evidently thinks she is
doing a big thing. Two thousand dollars a year! Why, that is not much
more than mother allows me now, and I am awfully hard up at times. No,
Bessie, you must wait a little longer until something turns up, as I am
sure there will. An overseer! _I!_" and Neil's voice was indicative of
the scorn and contempt with which he regarded an overseer of cotton
mills, and the vast difference he felt there was between such an
individual and himself.

Neil was very sore and very much depressed, and his depression told upon
his health, and he became so pale and haggard that his mother was
alarmed, and insisted upon his leaving England for a time and going down
to Cannes, in Southern France, where several of her friends were
spending the winter. To this Neil made no objection, and wrote to Bessie
of his plans, and made himself out so great an invalid that Bessie felt
a fear in her heart lest her lover should die and she be left in the
world alone, in case--She did not dare finish the thought, or put into
words her conviction that her father was daily growing weaker, with less
care for or interest in any thing passing around him. This change for
the worse had commenced with a heavy cold, taken soon after the
holidays, and which none of Dorothy's prescriptions could reach. It was
in vain that Bessie tried to persuade him to let her call a physician.

"No, child," he said, "it's nothing. I shall be better in a few days,
when the weather moderates. I do not want a doctor, and if I did we are
too poor. How much have we on hand?"

Bessie did not tell him the exact amount, for fear of troubling him in
his weak, nervous condition.

Their Christmas hospitalities had cost them dear, and there was very
little in the family purse with which to meet their