of your opinion, my dear. As you observe, that is
precisely what I am doing."

So the interview terminated. It was very provoking to Mrs. Preston
that her husband should have given away a hundred dollars to Andy
Burke's mother, but the thing was done, and could not be undone.
However, she wrote an account of the affair to Godfrey, who, she knew,
would sympathize fully with her view of the case. I give some extracts
from her letter:

"Your father seems perfectly infatuated with that low Irish boy. Of
course, I allude to Andy Burke. He has gone so far as to give him a
hundred dollars. Yesterday, in riding home from Melville, with eight
hundred dollars in his pocketbook, he says he was stopped by a
highwayman, who demanded his money or his life. Very singularly, Andy
came up just in the nick of time with a gun, and made a great show of
interfering, and finally drove the man away, as your father reports.
He is full of praise of Andy, and, as I said, gave him a hundred
dollars, when two or three would have been quite enough, even had the
rescue been real. But of this I have my doubts. It is very strange
that the boy should have been on the spot just at the right time,
still more strange that a full-grown man should have been frightened
away by a boy of fifteen. In fact, I think it is what they call a
'put-up job.' I think the robber and Andy were confederates, and that
the whole thing was cut and dried, that the man should make the
attack, and Andy should appear and frighten him away, for the sake of
a reward which I dare say the two have shared together. This is what I
think about the matter. I haven't said so to your father, because he
is so infatuated with the Irish boy that it would only make him angry,
but I have no doubt that you will agree with me. [It may be said here
that Godfrey eagerly adopted his mother's view, and was equally
provoked at his father's liberality to his young enemy.] Your father
says he won't give you the ten dollars you asked for. He can lavish a
hundred dollars on Andy, but he has no money to give his own son. But
sooner or later that boy will be come up with--sooner or later he will
show himself in his true colors, and your father will be obliged to
confess that he has been deceived. It puts me out of patience when I
think of him.

"We shall expect you home on Friday afternoon of next week, as usual."

Andy was quite unconscious of the large space which he occupied in the
thoughts of Mrs.