She paused a while, finger on lip, meditating, the double ply of calculation, stamped on her father's brow, very strongly marked on hers. "Look here, Duncan," she said caressingly, like a grown woman wooing to get her own way, so deep her voice was, "daddy is giving you that money because you are going to marry me, isn't he?" I signed, as well as I could, that Mr. Robert Anderson of Birkenbog considered himself as so doing. She clapped her hands and cried out, as if she had stumbled on the solution of some exceedingly difficult problem, "Why, then, take the money and give it to Tom! He needs it for his farm--oh, just dreadful. He says the hill is not half stocked, and that a hundred or two more ewes would just be the saving of him!" "But," said I, "I shall be entering into an agreement with your father, and shall have to give him receipts!" "Well," she continued boldly, "Thomas will enter into an agreement with you, if he doesn't marry me--that is, if I am left on your hands--he will pay you the money back--or else give you the sheep!" It will hardly be believed the difficulty I had to make Charlotte see the impossibility--nay, the dishonesty of an arrangement which appeared so simple to her. She thought for a while that I was just doing it out of jealousy, and she sulked. I reasoned with her, but I might as well have tried logic on the Gallaberry black-faced ewes. She continued to revolve the project in her own mind. "Whatever you--I mean _we_--can get out of father is to the good," she said. "He will never miss it. If you don't, I will ask him for the money for your fees myself and give it to Tom----" "If you do!" I cried in horror,--"oh--you don't know what you are talking about, girl!" "You don't love me a bit," she said. "What would it matter to you? Besides, if it comes to giving a receipt, I can imitate your signature to a nicety. Agnes Anne says so." "But, Charlotte, it would be forgery," I gasped. "They hang people for forgery." "No, they don't--at least, not for that sort," she argued, her eyes very bright with the working of her inward idea. "For how can it be forgery when it is _your_ name I write, and I've told you of it beforehand? It's my father's money, isn't it, and he gives it to you for marrying me? Very well, then, it's yours--no, I mean it's Tom's because he means to marry me. At least I mean to marry him. Anyway, the money is not my father's, because he gives it freely to you (or Tom) for a certain purpose. Well, Tom is going to be the one who will carry out that purpose. So the money is his. Therefore it's honest and no forgery!"