“Listen to her!” said the old man; “first telling me to spend it myself, and then to give half to the boy. Nothing of the sort, Lucy; I know what justice is, and I mean to do it. Do you think I could take poor Lucilla’s money to make that brat a gentleman? Why, it’s a kind of insult to her, poor thing, that he’s there at all. I don’t say a word against his mother, Lucy, but I always felt I never ought to have married her. I was not like a young man, I was middle-aged even before I married poor Lucilla, and I had no business to have the other; it was a mistake, it was an affront to your poor mother. People say that you show how happy you’ve been with the first when you get a second, but I don’t go in with that. When I think of facing these two women and not knowing which I belong to, I-- I don’t like it, Lucy. Lucilla was always very considerate, and made great allowances, but there are things a woman can’t be expected to put up with, and I don’t like the thought.” The humor and half-ludicrous pathos of this explanation, which was made between a laugh and a sob, was lost upon Lucy, who was altogether taken by surprise, and whose sense of humor was but little developed. She gazed at him with her eyes a little more widely opened than usual, not knowing what to say. Had she been a more experienced person, no doubt she would have consoled him with the reflection that husbands and wives, as we are told, do not stand exactly on the same footing in the next world. But she did not feel capable of saying anything in opposition to this matter-of-fact compunction; it has much in it which commends itself to the unsophisticated. She only gazed at her father, seeing difficulties in the way of his exit from the world which she had never thought of before. “But that is neither here nor there,” he said, with his usual chuckle much subdued. “It is only to explain to you why I won’t give anything but my own savings to Jock. I have often told you so before, but now you know the reason why.” Lucy was silent for a time, pondering over all this then she said, in the same serious tone. “But papa, I don’t see that what you have said is any answer to my question. I want to know why you should live here so quietly and save, and leave everything to me to do, when it would be so much better to do it yourself.” “Some one has put this into your head.” “No; only something set me thinking--why shouldn’t you, papa, take a great house instead of this; and have carriages and servants, and do all these things--giving and endowing, and building and setting up--that you want me to do--”