himself by arranging the world after his
fashion, and trying how much confusion he could make. I don't mean to
say anything unkind of him. I should like to have known him: he must
have been a character. But he has left us a great deal of botheration.
This particular thing, you know, that you are driving yourself crazy
about is sheer absurdity, Lucy. Solomon himself could not do it,--and
who are you, a little girl without any knowledge of the world, to see
into people's hearts, and decide whom it is safe to trust?"

"You are putting more upon me than poor papa did, Tom," said Lucy, a
little more cheerfully. "He never said, as we do in charities, that it
was to go to deserving people. I was never intended to see into their
hearts. So long as they required it and got the money, that was all he
wanted."

"Well, then, my dear," said Sir Tom, "if your father in his great sense
and judgment wanted nothing but to get rid of the money, I wonder he did
not tell you to stand upon Beachy Head or Dover Cliff on a certain day
in every year and throw so much of it into the sea--to be sure," he
added with a laugh, "that would come to very much the same thing--for
you can't annihilate money, you can only make it change hands--and the
London roughs would soon have found out your days for this wise purpose
and interrupted it somehow. But it would have been just as sensible.
Poor little woman! Here I am beginning to argue, and abusing your poor
father, whom, of course, you were fond of, and never so much as offering
you a chair! There is something on every one of them, I believe. Here,
my love, here is a seat for you," he said, displacing a box of
curiosities and clearing a corner for her by the fire. But Lucy resisted
quietly.

"Wouldn't it do another time, Tom?" she said with a little anxiety, "for
Aunt Randolph is all by herself, and she will wonder what has become of
me; and baby will be coming back from his walk." Then she made a little
pause, and resumed again, folding her hands, and raising her mild eyes
to his face. "I am very sorry to go against you, Tom. I think I would
rather lose all the money altogether. But there is just one thing, and
oh, do not be angry! I must carry out papa's will if I were to die!"

Her husband, who had begun to enter smilingly upon this discussion, with
a certainty of having the best of it, and who had listened to her
smilingly in her simple pleas for deferring the conversation, pleas
which he was v