d shout for him. What a grave
deference and sympathy the bankers and the lawyers show! There was too
great a stake at issue between those two that they should ever love each
other very cordially. As long as one man keeps another out of twenty
thousand a year, the younger must be always hankering after the crown,
and the wish must be the father to the thought of possession. Thank
Heaven, there was no thought of money between me and our dear mother,
Laura."

"There never could have been. You would have spurned it!" cried Laura.
"Why make yourself more selfish than you are, Pen; and allow your mind
to own for an instant that it would have entertained such--such dreadful
meanness? You make me blush for you, Arthur: you make me----" her eyes
finished this sentence, and she passed her handkerchief across them.

"There are some truths which women will never acknowledge," Pen said,
"and from which your modesty always turns away. I do not say that I ever
knew the feeling, only that I am glad I had not the temptation. Is there
any harm in that confession of weakness?"

"We are all taught to ask to be delivered from evil, Arthur," said
Laura, in a low voice. "I am glad if you were spared from that great
crime; and only sorry to think that you could by any possibility have
been led into it. But you never could; and you don't think you could.
Your acts are generous and kind: you disdain mean actions. You take
Blanche without money, and without a bribe. Yes, thanks be to Heaven,
dear brother. You could not have sold yourself away; I knew you could
not when it came to the day, and you did not. Praise be--be where praise
is due. Why does this horrid scepticism pursue you, my Arthur? Why doubt
and sneer at your own heart--at every one's? Oh, if you knew the pain
you give me--how I lie awake and think of those hard sentences, dear
brother, and wish them unspoken, unthought!"

"Do I cause you many thoughts and many tears, Laura?" asked Arthur.
The fulness of innocent love beamed from her in reply. A smile heavenly
pure, a glance of unutterable tenderness, sympathy, pity, shone in
her face--all which indications of love and purity Arthur beheld and
worshipped in her, as you would watch them in a child, as one fancies
one might regard them in an angel.

"I--I don't know what I have done," he said, simply, "to have merited
such regard from two such women. It is like undeserved praise, Laura--or
too much good fortune, which frightens one