Lucy
is taller, with perhaps more regular features, and certainly more
quiet in her manner."

"Ayala can be very quiet too," said the lover.

"Oh, yes,--because she varies in her moods. I remember her almost as
a child, when she would remain perfectly still for a quarter of an
hour, and then would be up and about the house everywhere, glancing
about like a ray of the sun reflected from a mirror as you move it in
your hand."

"She has grown steadier since that," said the Colonel.

"I cannot imagine her to be steady,--not as Lucy is steady. Lucy, if
it be necessary, can sit and fill herself with her own thoughts for
the hour together."

"Which of them was most like their father?"

"They were both of them like him in their thorough love for things
beautiful;--but they are both of them unlike him in this, that he
was self-indulgent, while they, like women in general, are always
devoting themselves to others." She will not devote herself to me,
thought Jonathan Stubbs to himself, but that may be because, like her
father, she loves things beautiful. "My poor Lucy," continued Hamel,
"would fain devote herself to those around her if they would only
permit it."

"She would probably prefer devoting herself to you," said the
Colonel.

"No doubt she would,--if it were expedient. If I may presume that she
loves me, I may presume also that she would wish to live with me."

"Is it not expedient?" asked the other.

"It will be so, I trust, before long."

"But it seems to be so necessary just at present." To this the
sculptor at the moment made no reply. "If," continued Stubbs, "they
treat her among them as you say, she ought at any rate to be relieved
from her misery."

"She ought to be relieved certainly. She shall be relieved."

"But you say that it is not expedient."

"I only meant that there were difficulties;--difficulties which will
have to be got over. I think that all difficulties are got over when
a man looks at them steadily."

"This, I suppose, is an affair of money."

"Well, yes. All difficulties seem to me to be an affair of money.
A man, of course, would wish to earn enough before he marries to
make his wife comfortable. I would struggle on as I am, and not be
impatient, were it not that I fear she is more uncomfortable as she
is now than she would be here in the midst of my poverty."

"After all, Hamel, what is the extent of the poverty? What are the
real circumstances? As you have gone so far yo