ood one, is Miss Sally; but when
a woman sees a man poor--well, of course, that's her revenge."

"Is--is Sir Miles _poor?_"

Tilda's hopes were tottering, falling about her, she hardly knew how or
why. Vaguely she had been building up a fabric of hope that she was
helping Arthur Miles home to a splendid inheritance. Such things
happened, almost as a matter of course, in the penny fiction to which
her reading had been exclusively confined. To be sure, they never
happened--they were wildly unlikely to happen--in the world of her own
limited experience. But in the society to which the boy belonged by his
gentle manners and his trick of speech, which could only come as a
birthright--in that rarefied world where the ladies wore low gowns, with
diamonds around their necks, and the gentlemen dined in fine linen with
wide shirt-fronts--all life moved upon the machinery of romance.
The books said so; and after that romance she had been pursuing, by
degrees more consciously, from fugitive hints almost to certainty that a
few hours would give it into her grasp. And now--

"Is--is he poor?" she repeated. She could not understand it.
The story-books always conducted the long-lost heir to rank and wealth
in the end.

"Well, he don't _spend_ money, they say," answered Chrissy. "But nobody
knows for certain. His tenants never see him. He's always abroad:
he's abroad now--"

"Abroad?"

This was worse and worse.

"Or else shut up at Meriton--that's the great house--with a lot of nasty
chemicals, trying to turn copper pennies into gold, they say."

Tilda caught at this hope.

"P'r'aps 'e'll manage it, one of these days."

"That's silly. Folks have been trying it for hundreds of years, and
it'll never be done."

"And 'Olmness? 'As Miss Sally bought 'Olmness too?"

"No; he wouldn't part with it, for some reason. But father rents the
grazing from him; same as before, when th' island belonged to Inistow
Farm. There's a tale--"

But Tilda was not to hear the tale, for just now Mrs. Tossell pushed
back her chair, and at her signal the feast ended. All left the table,
and exchanged their benches for the settle or for chairs which they drew
in a wide semicircle around the fireplace. Across the warm chord of
this semicircle the sheep-dogs, stretched before the blaze, looked up
lazily, and settled themselves to doze again. 'Dolph, lying a little
apart (for they declined to take notice of him), copied their movements