We were not rivals. I do not know how the thought of her came to Jack in those early days, but he had a habit of decision, and I dare say had made up his mind that she was to be his wife. He had plenty of pocket-money, and could buy her trinkets, ribbons and gloves: I had no money, and my tribute to her was of flowers and fruits. It was natural to both of us to offer her all we could; and it was equally natural to her to receive our largesse with a smile and laughing thanks if it pleased her, and a cool, indifferent shrug of contempt if it failed to suit her. I carried the thought of her into all my occupations. Were I planting my mother's flower-beds, were I writing my composition, it was all the same: the question was, "Will it please Georgy?" Not that it mattered; and I well knew that I was a fool for it all, for she was steadily indifferent to any matters in which she had no personal concern, and despised my pains with scant ceremony. I too held in contempt my small efforts to please her, and fell a-dreaming of the wonderful things I was sure to do some time. Not that she was slow in telling us what she wanted, and her demands upon us were not of the sort that appertain to heroic achievements; yet I felt, all the same, that let me once be a hero I must win her approbation. I can remember her sitting in our garden at home under the laburnums, with the greenery making a background for her fresh girl-face. From her babyhood her beauty had been remarked, and at ten years old she was as used to compliments as an old woman of the world. Mrs. Lenox had long since resigned expectation for herself, but she was not yet too hopeless to indulge in passionate belief of a brilliant future for her daughter; and when I used to listen to the gorgeous day-dreams of the two, I felt dejectedly that my own most radiant visions were by comparison the offspring of a lifeless and gloomy fancy. There was nothing problematical or idealistic in their ideas of a happy destiny. What they wanted was, in the first place, money; in the second place, money; thirdly and finally, money. I doubt whether Mrs. Lenox ever resigned herself to the sway of fiction or poetry, but I am sure that had she studied Shakespeare she would have thought Iago's advice to Roderigo shrewdly comprised the worth of all aspiration. She and Georgy longed for dress, jewels and laces; great houses panelled with mirrors and carpeted with velvet; magnificence and pomp and circumstance about their every-day life; horses, carriages, invitations, theatres, operas,--all the pleasures which throng toward people with lined pockets and idle lives. Their wants were innumerable, their taste and fancy a harp of a thousand strings upon which caprice and vanity could play an endless variety of tunes. Mrs. Lenox had once enjoyed the luxuries she still coveted so ardently, yet Georgy, who had never known wealth, or even the easy-assured comforts of life, had