"Which he didn't get because an over-ruling Providence had ordained that you shouldn't have it to lend him. Well, after years of silence and neglect, he turns up in Oldchester one fine morning, and walks into your house bringing his little girl 'on a visit to her dear grandmother.' Talk of brass! What sort of a material do you suppose that man's features are composed of?" "Gutta percha, very likely," returned Mrs. Dobbs, who now sat resting her head against the cushions of her chair, and listening to Mr. Weatherhead's eloquence with a half-humorous resignation; "that's a good, tough, elastic kind of stuff." "Tough! He had need have some toughness of countenance to come into this house as he did. And that's not the end. He swaggers about Oldchester for a week or two, using your house as an inn, neither more nor less--except that there's no bill;--and then one day he starts off for the Continent, leaving little May here, and promising to send for her as soon as he gets settled. From that day to this, and it's four years ago, you have had the child on your hands, and her precious father has never contributed one shilling towards her support. You sent the child back to school. You pinched, and saved, and denied yourself many little comforts to keep her there. You have never let her feel or guess that she has been a burthen on you in your old age. And I say again, Sarah Dobbs, that, considering all the circumstances of the case, there's not another woman in England would have done what you've done. No, nor in Europe!" "Well, having come to that, I hope you've finished, Jo Weatherhead." "I hope I have," returned Mr. Weatherhead, mopping his flushed face with a very large red pocket-handkerchief. "I hope I have, for the present. But if you attempt to contradict a word of what I have been saying, I'll begin again and go still further!" "There, there, then that's settled. But I am thinking of the future. Supposing I died to-morrow, what's to become of May? I have nothing to leave her. My bit of property goes back to Dobbs's family, and all right and fair, too. I've nothing to say against my husband's will. But people like the Hadlows, who invite May, and make much of her, have no idea that she has no one to look to but me. I don't say they'd give her the cold shoulder if they did know it; but it would make a difference. As it is, they talk to her about her aunt, Mrs. Dormer-Smith, and her cousin, Lord This, and her connection, Lady T'other, and a kind of a--what shall I say?--a sort of atmosphere of high folks hangs about her. She's Miss Miranda Cheffington, with fifty relations in the peerage. If she was known only as the grandchild of Mrs. Dobbs, the ironmonger's widow, she would seem mightily changed in a good many eyes. Sometimes it comes over me as if I was letting May go on under false pretences." "Why, she _has_ got fifty relations in the peerage, hasn't she?"