“We trying to get as much as we can,--they to give us as little as they can?” repeated Nelly, with a dreamy wonder in her tone. She dwelt on the words as if she were counting them, like beads. She had withdrawn, quite involuntarily and unawares, from his side. “I don’t want to vex you about it,” he said, drawing closer to her. “It can’t be helped, and after it is settled, things will come right again. You don’t know anything about business, and I don’t want you to know about it----” “I know all about mamma’s business,” said Nelly. She withdrew again with a little impatience from his close approach. She fell amusing and thinking, and made some excuse, soon after, to get away from him. She was startled beyond measure in the straight-forwardness of a soul unacquainted with business. Very strange to her was this unexpected distinction and separation. Was it really possible that her mother’s interests were opposite to her own, for the first time in her life? “We trying to get as much as we can,--they to give us as little as they can,” she said to herself, in the solitude of her room, putting the fingers of one hand against those of the other, as if to count the words. Nelly was bewildered,--her head was dizzy through this strange whirlabout of heaven and earth,--the firm ground seemed failing beneath her feet. It was about this time that another person appeared on the family scene, a man about whom none of the Eastwoods felt any particular interest, or rather, against whom they had all a decided prejudice. This was John Vane, a distant cousin of Innocent’s father, a squire in the north country, with considerable, but poor estates, who had lived a wandering life for some years, and who was considered by all who knew him “eccentric,” to say the least. His true name was Reginald or Roland, or something of a sentimental and ornamental description represented by the letter R; but Society, which has a way of identifying character by this simple means, called him John. He was a man of three or four and thirty, with a brown complexion tanned by much exposure to wind and weather, and a golden brown beard, which was the chief feature about him to a stranger. His hair had worn off his temples, and he had a threatening of baldness, as if the forest on his chin had drawn all his locks downwards. His forehead was clear and open and white, in contrast with the tanned and much-lined surface of the more exposed parts of his face. He was by no means the nearest or even a near relation of Innocent, but he had lost no time in seeking her out. He arrived on the very day when this first touch of doubt and pain came into Nelly’s belief in her lover; and it was by no means a happy household in which the new comer appeared one bright spring morning shortly after the events we have been telling. His mission was to ask what had become of his cousin’s child, to ascertain in the most delicate way possible what was her position in