"If this life cannot be endured, it must be cured--to reverse a vulgar saw, Mary," said he, continuing his short promenade; "if I cannot be rich, Derval shall be so, if any scheme of mine can achieve that end; and as soon as he is old enough, I shall teach him how money can make money, and how to keep it hard and fast--hard and fast--when it is made, and not be a fool like his father." "Teach not the child thus, Greville, I implore you," said Mary, relinquishing her knitting; "of what avail will it be, if I strive to make him virtuous, kind to the poor, prudent and industrious, if you instil precepts so stern, so cold and selfish into his young mind? If you have affection for me, Greville dearest, abandon such cruel ideas and plans, or I will begin to think you a changed man, and the Greville Hampton of to-day is not Greville that won the love of my girlhood--yea, and of my life," she added with great tenderness. "I am a changed man--I admit it--a sorely changed man, in all things but my love for you, Mary," he replied, as he stooped and kissed her bright little upturned face, and perhaps thought for a moment--but a moment only--that no man could be unhappy who had the smile and love of such a woman as Mary to brighten the path and lighten the burden of his life. "Riches are good and a godsend," said she, "if employed aright and not as a means of pleasure only." "Aright?" repeated Greville, who was thinking of the clubs he once frequented, his whilom team of roans, and Ascot perhaps. "Pleasure as a means of doing good and protecting the poor, assisting merit and rewarding ingenuity. The rich man who presumes on his wealth, and the poor man who desponds on his poverty are--" "Oh, don't preach, Mary darling, leave that to our friend Asperges Laud. You are a duck and an angel, but I can't quite agree with you," he added with a sigh as he filled his briar-root with tobacco of a kind he would have disdained to smoke once. Many emotions combined to fill Mary's eyes with tears, but to conceal them she turned away to seek Patty's aid in the preparation of some jellies for one of her pensioners--for though so poor herself she had several--a deformed girl who was dying of consumption; and in spare times she was wont to read good and amusing books by the bedsides of the old and blind, who were ailing or unable to be abroad. She had even pensioners among the little birds, for whom she daily spread out crumbs, especially in winter, upon her doorstep, whither they would come without fear of Mary's pet cat, which was too well fed to meddle with them. Greville Hampton was in an unusually bitter mood that night, and long, long he sat abandoned to it after Mary had given a final but lingering look at the little subject of their anxieties, folded in his pretty cot, "like the callow cygnet in its nest," and then sought her pillow.