Enderley, and your Catholic Emancipation--your Abolition of Slavery and
your Parliamentary Reform--why, there is hardly any scheme for good,
public or private, to which you do not lend a helping hand."

"A helping purse, perhaps, which is an easier thing, much."

"I will not have you blaming yourself. Ask Phineas, there--our
household Solomon."

"Thank you, Ursula," said I, submitting to the not rare fortune of
being loved and laughed at.

"Uncle Phineas, what better could John have done in all these years,
than look after his mills and educate his three sons?"

"Have them educated, rather," corrected he, sensitive over his own
painfully-gained and limited acquirements. Yet this feeling had made
him doubly careful to give his boys every possible advantage of study,
short of sending them from home, to which he had an invincible
objection. And three finer lads, or better educated, there could not
be found in the whole country.

"I think, John, Guy has quite got over his fancy of going to Cambridge
with Ralph Oldtower."

"Yes; college life would not have done for Guy," said the father
thoughtfully.

"Hush! we must not talk about them, for here come the children."

It was now a mere figure of speech to call them so, though in their
home-taught, loving simplicity, they would neither have been ashamed
nor annoyed at the epithet--these two tall lads, who in the dusk looked
as man-like as their father.

"Where is your sister, boys?"

"Maud stopped at the stream with Edwin," answered Guy, rather
carelessly. His heart had kept its childish faith; the youngest, pet
as she was, was never anything to him but "little Maud." One--whom the
boys still talked of, softly and tenderly, in fireside evening talks,
when the winter winds came and the snow was falling--one only was ever
spoken of by Guy as "sister."

Maud, or Miss Halifax, as from the first she was naturally called--as
naturally as our lost darling was never called anything else than
Muriel--came up, hanging on Edwin's arm, which she was fond of doing,
both because it happened to be the only arm low enough to suit her
childish stature, and because she was more especially "Edwin's girl,"
and had been so always. She had grown out of the likeness that we
longed for in her cradle days, or else we had grown out of the
perception of it; for though the external resemblance in hair and
complexion still remained, nothing could be more unlike in spirit than
this s