aunt at his praises of her orphan charge.

"God be praised, they have their health; and on the whole they are good
bairns, though a thought noisy whiles," said she.

"There's a gentleman at the stairfoot," said Tom. "He says he has come
for you and your sister, Miss Melville, and as it was our dinner-time,
he would not come up."

"Bid him walk upstairs, for the dinner's no ready. Mr. Brandon was aye
rather an off-put to work, and ye'll no get your dinner for a good
quarter of an hour yet."

"We are quite ready," said Jane; "We will go at once. It is our cousin,
who was to call for us."

"We may go out to play then for a bit?" said Willie.

"If ye'll no go far, and be sure to be in time for the school."

Francis came up, to be surprised at the sight of Mr. Brandon, and to
receive a hurried explanation of his presence at Peggy Walker's, and
then they went for a walk. By daylight he was struck more with the
change that had shown itself in both of his cousins, and with the poor
home they had to live in. Jane's proposal on the previous night to go
to Mrs. Dunn's had distressed him more than any other of her projects,
and yet he could do nothing to prevent it, unless by making the
sacrifice which my young lady readers think he should have made long
ago, and given up the estate to marry his cousin. "All for love, and
the world well lost," is a fascinating course of procedure in books and
on the stage, but in real life there are a good many things to be
considered. It was only lately that Francis had discovered how very
dear Jane was to him. If such a woman had come across his path when he
was in the bank with his 250 pounds a-year, with any reasonable chance
of obtaining her, he would have exerted every effort and made every
sacrifice to gain such a companion for life. He would have given up all
his more expensive bachelor habits--his book-buying, and his public
amusements, and thought domestic happiness cheaply purchased by such
privations. And if Jane could have shared his brighter fortune, he
would have offered his hand and heart long before. But now, even
supposing that he had contracted no expensive habits, and he found that
he had--that he liked the handsome fortune, and the luxuries annexed to
it--it was not his own personal gratification that he was required to
give up, but the duties, and the opportunities for usefulness that Jane
so highly prized for him. He could not even expect to take as good a
position i