ly,
but as his eyes met hers they fell suddenly, and he muttered in a
half-broken voice, "I meant all for the best!"

"Well," cried she, after a brief pause, "it is no time for regrets, or
recriminations either. It is surely neither your fault nor mine that the
cotton crop is a failure, or that discounts are high in Broadway. When
May comes in, you must explain to her what has happened, and ask her
leave to sell out her Sardinian stock. It is a small sum, to be sure,
but it will give us a respite for a day or two, and then we shall think
of our next move."

She left the room as she said this, and anything more utterly hopeless
than the old Baronet it would be difficult to imagine. Bewildered and
almost stunned by the difficulties around him, a sort of vague sense of
reliance upon _her_ sustained him so long as she was there. No sooner,
however, had she gone, than this support seemed withdrawn, and he sat,
the very picture of dismay and discomfiture.

The project by which the artful Mrs. Morris had originally seduced him
into speculation was no other than to employ Miss Leslie's fortune as
the means of making advantageous purchases of land in the States, and
of discounting at the high rate of interest so freely given in times of
pressure in the cities of the Union. To suffer a considerable sum to
lie unprofitably yielding three per cent at home, when it might render
thirty by means of a little energy and a little skill, seemed actually
absurd; and not a day used to go over, in which she would not compute,
from the recorded rates of the exchanges, the large gains that might
have been realized, without, as she would say, "the shadow of a shade
of risk." Sir William had once gambled on 'Change and in railroad
speculations the whole of a considerable estate; and the old leaven
of speculation still worked within him. If there be a spirit which no
length of years can efface, no changes of time eradicate, it is the
gamester's reliance upon fortune. Estranged for a long period as he had
lived from all the exciting incidents of enterprise, no sooner was the
picture of gain once more displayed before him than he eagerly embraced
it.

"Ah!" he would say to himself, "if I had but had the advantage of _her_
clear head and shrewd power of calculation long ago, what a man I might
be to-day! That woman's wit of hers puts all mere men's acuteness to the
blush." It is not necessary to say that the softest of blue eyes and the
silkies