ald's pocket, which she supposed would have to be
mulcted for all this magnificence. Perceiving this, Ernest relieved her
mind and told her all about his aunt's bequest, and how I had husbanded
it, in the presence of his brother and sister--who, however, pretended
not to notice, or at any rate to notice as a matter in which they could
hardly be expected to take an interest.

His mother kicked a little at first against the money's having gone to
him as she said "over his papa's head." "Why, my dear," she said in a
deprecating tone, "this is more than ever your papa has had"; but Ernest
calmed her by suggesting that if Miss Pontifex had known how large the
sum would become she would have left the greater part of it to Theobald.
This compromise was accepted by Christina who forthwith, ill as she was,
entered with ardour into the new position, and taking it as a fresh point
of departure, began spending Ernest's money for him.

I may say in passing that Christina was right in saying that Theobald had
never had so much money as his son was now possessed of. In the first
place he had not had a fourteen years' minority with no outgoings to
prevent the accumulation of the money, and in the second he, like myself
and almost everyone else, had suffered somewhat in the 1846 times--not
enough to cripple him or even seriously to hurt him, but enough to give
him a scare and make him stick to debentures for the rest of his life. It
was the fact of his son's being the richer man of the two, and of his
being rich so young, which rankled with Theobald even more than the fact
of his having money at all. If he had had to wait till he was sixty or
sixty-five, and become broken down from long failure in the meantime, why
then perhaps he might have been allowed to have whatever sum should
suffice to keep him out of the workhouse and pay his death-bed expenses;
but that he should come in to 70,000 pounds at eight and twenty, and have
no wife and only two children--it was intolerable. Christina was too ill
and in too great a hurry to spend the money to care much about such
details as the foregoing, and she was naturally much more good-natured
than Theobald.

"This piece of good fortune"--she saw it at a glance--"quite wiped out
the disgrace of his having been imprisoned. There should be no more
nonsense about that. The whole thing was a mistake, an unfortunate
mistake, true, but the less said about it now the better. Of course
Ernest