r a long time in
doing this--excluding the consideration of it, and forgetting the burden
bound upon her shoulders. But now she could forget it no longer--the
thongs which secured it seemed to cut into her flesh. Her heart was sick
with thoughts of the thing she must do, yet revolted against doing. "Oh,
papa, papa!" she said to herself, shaking her head at the grim,
respectable house in which her early days had been passed, as they drove
past it to Mr. Rushton's office. Why had the old man put such a burden
upon her? Why had not he distributed his money himself and left her
poor if he pleased, with at least no unnatural charge upon her heart and
life?

"Why do you shake your head?" said Jock, who was full of the keenest
observation, and lost nothing.

He had an instinctive feeling that she was by no means so much
interested in her duty as he was, and that it was his business to keep
her up to the mark.

"Don't you remember the old house?" Lucy said, "where we used to live
when you were a child? Where poor papa died--where----"

"Of course I remember it. I always look at it when I pass, and think
what a little ass I used to be. But why did you shake your head? That's
what I want to know."

"Oh, Jock!" Lucy cried; and said no more.

"That throws very little light on the question," said Jock. "You are
thinking of the difference, I suppose. Well, there is no doubt it's a
great difference. I was a little idiot in those days. I recollect I
thought the circus boy was a sort of little prince, and that it was
grand to ride along like that with all the people staring--the grandest
thing in the world----"

"Poor little circus boy! What a pretty child he was," said Lucy. And
then she sighed to relieve the oppression on her breast, and said, "Do
you ever wonder, Jock, why people should have such different lots? You
and I driving along here in what we once would have thought such state,
and look, these people that are crossing the road in the mud are just as
good as we are----"

Jock looked at his sister with a philosophical eye, in which for the
moment there was some contempt. "It is as easy as a, b, c," said Jock;
"it's your money. You might set me a much harder one. Of course, in the
way of horses and carriages and so forth, there is nothing that money
cannot buy."

This matter-of-fact reply silenced Lucy. She would have asked, perhaps,
why did I have all this money? being in a questioning frame of mind; but
she knew