.

'I wish I had him here,' muttered Tom, as he went off to serve a
customer. 'Peterborough is a better place for him than London;' for they
were living at Peterborough then.

Tom cheered up presently, when Mat wrote one of his flourishing letters;
he was a fine letter-writer. He was in luck's way, he told Tom, and had
fallen on his feet; at his first application he had obtained a clerkship
in some business house, and his employer had taken a fancy to him.

'I feel like Dick Whittington,' wrote Mat, in his happy, boastful way;
'all night long the bells were saying to me, "Turn again, turn again,
Mat O'Brien, for fortune is before you." I could hear them in my
dreams--and then the next morning came a letter from Mr. Turner. Dear
old chap, you won't bother about me any more, for I mean to stick to my
work like a galley slave. Give my love to Susan, and kiss the little
one--couldn't you have found a better name than that Puritan Priscilla,
you foolish Tom?'--and so on. Audrey once read that letter, and a dozen
more of the same type; she thought them very affectionate and clever.
Every now and then there were graphic descriptions of a day's amusement
or sight-seeing. What was it they lacked? Audrey could never answer
that question, but she laid them down with a dim feeling of
dissatisfaction.

Mat used to run down for a day or two when business permitted, and take
possession of his shabby little room under the roof. How happy honest
Tom would be on these occasions! how he would chuckle to himself as he
saw his customers--female customers especially--cast sidelong glances at
the handsome dark-haired youth who lounged by the door!

'Old Mrs. Stevenson took him for a gentleman,' Tom remarked to Susan
once, rubbing his hands over the joke. 'Mat is so well set up, and wears
such a good coat; just look at his boots!--and his shirts are ever so
much finer than mine; he looks like a young lord in his Sunday best,'
went on Tom, who admired his young brother with every fibre of his
heart.

Mat was quite aware of the sensation he made among his old friends and
neighbours; he liked to feel his own importance. He came pretty
frequently at first; he was tolerant of Susan's homeliness and sisterly
advice, he took kindly to Prissy, and brought her a fine coral necklace
to wear on her fat dimpled neck; but after a year or two he came less
often.

'Leave him alone,' Susan would say when Tom grumbled to her over his
pipe of an evenin