“You may calculate upon me, Miss Lucy. What is it? or do you want to tell me now, when I am going away?” His tone was cooled, chilled. Lucy did not quite know how, but she felt it. Almost for the first time since she had known him, Sir Thomas looked at her with no wavering of expression in his face, no twinkle in his eye. “It will perhaps--be a bore to you,” she said, chilled too, and hesitating. “You learned that word in town,” he said, melting and relaxing into his habitual laugh. “Come, tell me; when I know, then I shall be able to advise, and you will find me infallible. Something guardians oppose? then I suppose it must be a desire you have to be kind to other people, Lucy. They could not refuse you any little wants of your own.” “How clever you are, Sir Tom!” said Lucy lighting up; “that is just what, it is. Papa left me a great deal of money-- I believe it is really a great deal of money--to give away. Perhaps you may have noticed that I have been rude, very rude, in asking if people were--poor.” “You asked _me_ so ten minutes ago,” he said. “Oh, you must not think I meant-- Sir Thomas, papa says in his will--and he has said it to me often--not to waste the money, giving a little here, and a little there, but when I could find out a fit occasion to provide for somebody, to put them quite above want.” “And the thought crossed your sweet little soul,” he said, with one of his big laughs, “my dear child! to provide for me.” “No! Oh, no! I never could have been so impertinent; indeed that was not what I meant; only it flashed across me how much better, if I could, to give it to some one I liked, than to some one I knew nothing about and didn’t care for; but then it was not to be people I cared for--only people who were poor.” “Lucy, do you care for me?” “Very much, Sir Tom,” she said, with a brightness quite unusual to her, turning upon him eyes which met his with perfect frankness and calm. Will it be believed that Sir Thomas was utterly disgusted by this quite candid, affectionate, innocent response? “Ah! that is precisely what I said,” he muttered to himself, jumping up impatiently from his chair; then he laughed and sat down again. “Well, well, tell me how I can help you. This money is to be spent on the deserving poor. In short, it is a charitable fund.” “There is nothing about deserving. It is a great deal of money. It is nearly as much as the half of what I have got. What papa wished was that it should be _given back_.” “The half of what you have got!” Sir Thomas stared at her bewildered, in his mind making a rapid calculation that, with the half of what she had got, Lucy would no longer be the greatest heiress in England. He was not sorry. She would still have a great fortune. Somehow, indeed, it pleased and conciliated him that she should be put down from that high pedestal. This was his only reflection on the subject. “What are you to do? are you to establish institutions or build hospitals?” he said.