“Distant cousins,” he cried, impatiently, “are near when there are no nearer between. We are of the same blood, at least. You want to push me away, to make me feel I have nothing to do with it; but that can’t be so long as you are Meg Piercey----” “Margaret Osborne at your service,” she said, gravely. “Forgive me, Cousin Gerald. It is true, we have had enough of this tilting. I don’t doubt for a moment that you would give me a helping hand if you could; that you wish me well, and especially,” she added, lifting her eyes with a half reproach, half gratitude in them, “the boy--as you call him.” “What could I call him but the boy?” said Colonel Piercey, with a sort of exasperation. “Yes, I don’t deny it, it was of him I wanted to speak. He is a delightful boy--he is full of faculty and capacity, and one could make anything of him. Let me say quite sincerely what I think. You are not destitute; but you are not rich enough to give him the best of everything in the way of education, as--as--don’t slay me with a flash of lightning--as I could. Now I have said it! If you would trust him to me!” She had looked, indeed, for a moment as if her eyes could give forth lightning enough to have slain any man standing defenceless before her; but then these eyes softened with hot tears. She kept looking at the man, explaining himself with such difficulty, putting forth his offer of kindness as if it were some dreadful proposition, with a gradual melting of the lines in her face. When he threw a hasty glance at her at the end of his speech, she seemed to him a woman made of fire, shedding light about her in an astonishing transfiguration such as he had never seen before. “This,” she said, in a low voice, “is the most terrible demonstration of my poverty and helplessness that has ever been made to me--and the most awful suggestion, as of suicide and destruction.” “Meg!” “Don’t, don’t interrupt me! It is: I have never known how little good I was before. I don’t know now if it will kill me, or sting me to life; but all the same,” she cried, her lip quivering, “you are kind, and I thank you with all my heart! and I will promise you this: If I find, as you think, that, whatever I may do, I cannot give my Osy the education he ought to have, I will send and remind you of your offer. I hope you will have children of your own by that time, and perhaps you will have forgotten it.” “I shall not forget it; and I am very unlikely to have children of my own.” “Anyhow, I will trust you,” she said, “and I thank you with all my heart, though you are my enemy. And that is a bargain,” she said, holding out her hand. Her enemy! Was he her enemy? And yet it seemed something else beside. CHAPTER XXVII.