am glad you think so," the banker said sarcastically; "though I may
as well tell you, young lady, that it would still be done even without
your approval. What is it you don't like, spending your money for
other people?"

Julia smiled a little. "We may as well call it that," she said; "I
don't like the boarding-house investment."

"What do you like? Seeing your parents go to the poorhouse? That's
what will happen."

"No, they can come and live with me. I have got a large cottage, a
garden, a field, and L50 a year. If we keep pigs and poultry, and grow
things in the garden we can live in the cottage on the L50 a year till
the debts are all paid off; after that, of course, we should have
enough to be pretty comfortable. We need not keep a servant there, or
regard appearances or humbug--it would be very cheap."

"And nasty," her uncle added. He was not impressed with the wisdom of
this scheme; indeed he did not seriously contemplate it as possible.
"You are talking nonsense," he said; "absurd, childish nonsense; you
don't know anything about it; you have no idea what life in a cottage
means; the drudgery of cooking and scrubbing and so on; the doing
without society and the things you are used to; as for pigs and
gardening, why, you don't know how to dig a hole or grow a cabbage!"

But he was not quite right; Julia had learnt something about drudgery
in Holland, something about growing things, at least in theory, and so
much about doing without the society to which she was used at home
that she had absolutely no desire for it left. She made as much of
this plan to Mr. Ponsonby as was possible and desirable; enough, at
all events, to convince him that she had thought out her plan in every
detail and was very bent on it.

"I suppose the utter selfishness of this idea of yours has not struck
you," he said at last. "You may think you would like this kind of
life, though you wouldn't if you tried it, but how about your mother?"

"She won't like it," Julia admitted; "but then, on the other hand,
there is father. I suppose you know he has taken to drink lately and
at all times gambled as much as he could. What do you think would
become of him in a boarding-house in some fashionable place, with
nothing to do, and any amount of opportunity?"

Mr. Ponsonby did not feel able or willing to discuss the Captain's
delinquencies with his daughter; his only answer was, "What will
become of your mother keeping pigs and poultry and li