as you do'

'Where have you been, Vava Wharton?' demanded Miss Briggs

Stella goes to the prize distribution

A CITY SCHOOLGIRL AND HER FRIENDS.

CHAPTER I.

HARD FACTS.

'These are the facts, Miss Wharton; hard facts no doubt, but you wished
for the truth, and indeed I could not have hidden it from you even if I
had wished to do so.' So said a keen but kindly faced old gentleman, as
he sat in an office surrounded by despatch and deed boxes which
proclaimed his profession to be that of a lawyer.

The young lady to whom these remarks were addressed, and who was a
pretty girl of twenty-one, dressed in deep and obviously recent
mourning, now replied, with a sad smile, 'But I did not want you to hide
anything from me; I wanted to hear the truth, Mr. Stacey, and I thank
you very much for telling it to me. Then I may understand that we have
just fifty pounds a year to live upon between the two of us?'

'That is all, I am sorry to say; at least all that you can count upon
with any certainty for the present, for the shares, of which I have been
trying to tell you, at present bring in nothing, and may never do so. Of
course there is the furniture, which might fetch a hundred or two, for
there are two or three valuable pieces; and, besides that, your father
had some nice china and some fine old silver,' observed Mr. Stacey.

'Oh I could not sell that!' said the girl hastily, and her colour rose.

The old lawyer shook his head. 'It is not a case of _could_; it is a
case of _must_, my dear young lady,' he said not unkindly.

'But why? You say there are no debts to pay. Why, then, should we part
with all that is left to us of home?' argued the girl, the tears coming
into her eyes.

'Why? Because you must live, you and Vava, and I don't quite see how you
are to do that on fifty pounds a year--twenty-five pounds apiece--even
if we get your sister into a school where they would take her on
half-terms as a kind of pupil-teacher,' explained the lawyer patiently.

'Send Vava to a school as a pupil-teacher, to be looked down upon and
despised by the other girls who were richer than she, to waste half her
time in teaching, and let her go away from me? I could not do it!' cried
the girl impulsively. Then, as she saw the old man, who had been a
lifelong friend of her father's as well as his lawyer, shrug his
shoulders, as much as to say she was hopeless, she added more quietly,
'We have never been parted in our li