t go and tell my uncle."

"Mary," said Fred, seizing her hand as she rose; "if you will not give
me some encouragement, I shall get worse instead of better."

"I will not give you any encouragement," said Mary, reddening. "Your
friends would dislike it, and so would mine. My father would think it
a disgrace to me if I accepted a man who got into debt, and would not
work!"

Fred was stung, and released her hand. She walked to the door, but
there she turned and said: "Fred, you have always been so good, so
generous to me. I am not ungrateful. But never speak to me in that
way again."

"Very well," said Fred, sulkily, taking up his hat and whip. His
complexion showed patches of pale pink and dead white. Like many a
plucked idle young gentleman, he was thoroughly in love, and with a
plain girl, who had no money! But having Mr. Featherstone's land in
the background, and a persuasion that, let Mary say what she would, she
really did care for him, Fred was not utterly in despair.

When he got home, he gave four of the twenties to his mother, asking
her to keep them for him. "I don't want to spend that money, mother.
I want it to pay a debt with. So keep it safe away from my fingers."

"Bless you, my dear," said Mrs. Vincy. She doted on her eldest son and
her youngest girl (a child of six), whom others thought her two
naughtiest children. The mother's eyes are not always deceived in
their partiality: she at least can best judge who is the tender,
filial-hearted child. And Fred was certainly very fond of his mother.
Perhaps it was his fondness for another person also that made him
particularly anxious to take some security against his own liability to
spend the hundred pounds. For the creditor to whom he owed a hundred
and sixty held a firmer security in the shape of a bill signed by
Mary's father.

CHAPTER XV.

"Black eyes you have left, you say,
Blue eyes fail to draw you;
Yet you seem more rapt to-day,
Than of old we saw you.

"Oh, I track the fairest fair
Through new haunts of pleasure;
Footprints here and echoes there
Guide me to my treasure:

"Lo! she turns--immortal youth
Wrought to mortal stature,
Fresh as starlight's aged truth--
Many-named Nature!"

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the
happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his
place among the colossi whose huge legs