"On seventeen shillings and sixpence a week! Forty-five pounds a year!" "It will be a pound a week soon. Besides, I shall make more somehow. Something would have turned up," said Felix, with juvenile hopefulness. "And in time, you will be able to teach again,—not a great deal so as to knock yourself up, but enough to be a help. I mean to have a home for you both before long." The faded woman, lying on a sofa near the fire—faded, though scarcely thirty-five in age—knew better. She was too well aware that the prospective home would not be for her. It was a shabby little room: a most ordinary specimen of a second-rate lodging-house "parlour" in a dull back street of Brighton. Yet there was about it a certain refinement of air and tone. Cecilia Anderson was a lady, both by birth and by education: and her personality told upon her surroundings. Rows of well-bound books spoke of better days: and a graceful arrangement of moss and ferns gave evidence of somebody's love for beauty. Moreover, the three present, though to some extent shabby, were also scrupulously neat; and while work lay about, it was not flung about: and neither table-cloth nor carpet was bestrewn with the shreds of white cotton, too often seen in the wake of tasteless females. Lettice had not spoken yet. She knew well that Felix's opinion, not hers, was the important question, even though her future might be more acutely affected than his by the correspondence between Miss Anderson and Dr. Bryant. Not being self-assertive, she was in no haste to thrust herself into the discussion, but sat quietly, work in hand, glancing between the stitches from one to the other. "What did uncle Bryant do?" she at length asked, in the rather long silence following her brother's last words. "He's not your uncle,—or mine." "He is Sissie's,—" with a glance at Miss Anderson. "And what is mine is yours, of course," added Cecilia Anderson. "Oh, well—but you can't make a thing to be, when it isn't," rejoined Felix. "He's no scrap of relation to Lettice or me, you know—really—and he must have behaved abominably to your mother." "What did he do?" persisted Lettice. "He objected to my mother's marriage. I suppose there were hot words spoken—as usual, in family quarrels. I am not sure about the 'behaving abominably.' He tried to prevent what he did not think would be for her happiness. My mother had her way,—and there was no further intercourse between them." "And you to write to him—after all these years!" "That is it! So many years and years ago;—before I was born! My uncle must be quite an elderly man now. I don't think one ought to make too much of things spoken so very long since! He thought he was in the right,—and he did not really know our father. At least, he never learnt to love him. That is what I mean. It is all over now; and one has to forget sometimes. And he is my uncle. Better to be helped by him than by strangers."