"Lucy, child, were this money exclusively your aunt's, I would not hesitate to make use of sufficient of it now to save my good name. In that ease, I should wind up my affairs as soon as would be conveniently possible, retire from business, and see how far what is left to me would go towards a living. It would be enough; and my wife would have to bring her mind to think it so. But this sum that your aunt offers me--that you second--may be the very money she has been intending to hand over with you as a marriage portion. And what would your husband say at its being thus temporarily appropriated?" "My husband!" exclaimed Lucy, in amazement; "a marriage portion for me! When I take the one, it will be time enough to think of the other." Miss Arkell, too, looked up with a questioning gaze, for she had quite forgotten the little romance--her romance--concerning young Mr. Palmer. "I shall never marry," continued Lucy, in answer to Mr. Arkell's puzzled look. "I think I am better as I am." "But, Lucy, you _are_ going to marry. You are going to marry Tom Palmer." Lucy laughed. She could not help it, she said, apologetically. She had laughed ever since he asked her, except just at the time, at the very idea of her marrying Tom Palmer, the little friend of her girlhood. Tom laughed at it himself now; and they were as good friends as before. "But how _did_ you hear of it?" she exclaimed. Travice came forward, his cheek pale, his lip quivering. He laid his fevered hand on Lucy's shoulder. "Is this true, Lucy?" he whispered. "Is it true that you do not love Tom Palmer?" "Love him!" cried Lucy, indignantly, sad reproach in her eye, as she turned it on Travice. "You have seen us together hundreds of times; did you ever detect anything in my manner to induce you to think I 'loved' him?" "_I_ loved _you_," murmured Travice, for he read that reproach aright, and the scales which had obscured his eyes fell from them, as by magic. "I have long loved you--deeply, passionately. My brightest hopes were fixed on you; the heyday visions of all my future existence represented you by my side, my wife. But these misfortunes and losses came thick and fast upon my father. They told me at home here, _he_ told me, that I was poor and that you were poor, and that it would be madness in us to think of marrying then, as it would have been. So I said to myself that I would be patient, and wait--would be content with loving you in secret, as I had done--with seeing you daily as a relative. And then the news burst upon me that you were to marry Tom Palmer; and I thought what a fool I had been to fancy you cared for me; for I knew that you were not one to marry where you did not love." The tears were coursing down her cheeks. "But I don't understand," she said. "It is but just, as it were, that Tom has asked me; and you must be speaking of sometime ago." The fault was Mildred's. Not quite all at once could they understand it; not until later.