im as I propose."

"Yes. Nothing at all is to go to you then?"

"I should like to have this portrait of your father; and, Val, I wish to
assure you most sincerely that I do not judge your conduct. I have no
opinion to give upon it."

"I have a good right to tell you now, that I have for some months fully
intended to give up the place."

"Well, I am glad of that."

"I hope to recover, and then to work, living abroad, the better to
conceal matters. I had quite decided, John; and yet what you have done
is a shock to me. I feel that I am judged by it. I told you in the
autumn that I meant to go away; I did. But though I took the estate so
easily, so almost inevitably, I could not get away from it, though I
wished and tried."

"But you can now. If you want money, of course you will look to me to
help you. And so you could not manage to go?"

"No. So long as I was well and in high spirits I never meant to go; but
one night I got a great shock, and walking home afterwards by the mere,
I felt the mist strike to my very marrow. I have never been well since.
I had no heart to recover; but when I might have got away I was detained
by that trumpery trial till I was so ill that I could not safely travel;
but now, John, I am ready, and you cannot imagine how I long to be off,
and, please God, begin a better life, and serve Him as my old father
did. I have three hundred pounds of honest money in hand, besides the
two thousand your father gave me. But, John, Emily is my favourite
sister."

"There!" said John, "I was afraid this would come."

"If I _should_ die young--if she _should_ find that I have left every
shilling and every acre away from you and her, two of the people I love
most, and thrown it into the hands of strangers, I could not bear to
know that she would think meanly of my good sense and my affection after
I am gone."

John was silent.

"For," continued Valentine, "no one feels more keenly than she does that
it is not charity, not a good work, in a man to leave from his own
family what he does not want and can no longer use, thinking that it is
just as acceptable to God as if he had given it in his lifetime, when he
liked it, enjoyed it--when, in short, it was his own."

"You alienate it with no such thoughts."

"Oh, no, God forbid! But she will think I must have done. There is
hardly any one living who cares for me as much as she does. It would be
very distressing for me to die, knowing she would think m