"Mariamne told me there was a lot of lies--that people said--I am so glad, John, oh! so thankful, that you have not repeated any of them; for now I can feel you are my own good John, as you always were, not a slanderer of any one, and we can go on being fond of each other like brother and sister. I have told him you have been the best of brothers to me." "Oh," said John, without a sign of wonder or admiration in him, with a dead blank in his face. "And what do you think he said? 'Then I know he must be a capital fellow, Ne----'" "Not Nelly," said poor John, with a foolish pang that seemed to rend his heart. Oh, if that scamp, that cheat, that low betting, card-playing rascal were but here! he would capital-fellow him. To take not herself only, but the dear pet name that she had said was only John's---- "He says Nell sometimes, John. Oh, not Nelly--Nelly is for you only. I would never let him call me that. But they are all for short names, one syllable--he is Phil, and Mariamne, well at home they call her Jew--horrible, isn't it?--because she was called after some Jewess; but somehow it seems queer when you see her, so fair and frizzy, like anything but a Jew." "So I have got one letter to myself," said John. "I don't know that I think that worth very much, however. And so far as I can see, you seem to think everything very fine--the bets, perhaps, and the rows and all." "Well they are, you know," said Elinor, with a laugh, "to a little country mouse like me that has never seen anything. There is always something going on, and their slang way of speaking is certainly very amusing if it is not at all dignified, and they have such droll ways of looking at things. All so entirely different! Don't you know, John, sometimes in one's life one longs for something to be quite different. A complete change, anything new." "If that is what you long for, no doubt you will get it, Elinor." "Well!" she cried, "I have had the other for three-and-twenty years, long enough to have exhausted it, don't you think? but I don't mean to throw it over, oh, no! Coming back to mamma makes the arrangement perfect. Probably in the end it is the old life, the life I was brought up in that I shall like best in the long run. That is one thing of being well brought up. Phil will laugh till he cries when I tell him of your description of me as a well-brought-up girl."