“I wonder if there’s anything in life holy enough for you to take it seriously,” Miss Pynsent rejoined, snapping off a thread, with temper. “The day you stop laughing I should like to be there.” “So long as you are there, I shall never stop. What is it you want me to advise you? to take the child, or to leave the mother to groan herself out?” “I want you to tell me whether he’ll curse me when he grows older.” “That depends upon what you do. However, he will probably do it in either case.” “You don’t believe that, because you like him,” said Amanda, with acuteness. “Precisely; and he’ll curse me too. He’ll curse every one. He won’t be happy.” “I don’t know how you think I bring him up,” the little dressmaker remarked, with dignity. “You don’t bring him up; he brings you up.” “That’s what you have always said; but you don’t know. If you mean that he does as he likes, then he ought to be happy. It ain’t kind of you to say he won’t be,” Miss Pynsent added, reproachfully. “I would say anything you like, if what I say would help the matter. He’s a thin-skinned, morbid, mooning little beggar, with a good deal of imagination and not much perseverance, who will expect a good deal more of life than he will find in it. That’s why he won’t be happy.” Miss Pynsent listened to this description of her _protégé_ with an appearance of criticising it mentally; but in reality she didn’t know what ‘morbid’ meant, and didn’t like to ask. “He’s the cleverest person I know, except yourself,” she said in a moment, for Mr Vetch’s words had been in the key of what she thought most remarkable in him. What that was she would have been unable to say. “Thank you very much for putting me first,” the fiddler rejoined, after a series of puffs. “The youngster is interesting, one sees that he has a mind, and in that respect he is—I won’t say unique, but peculiar. I shall watch him with curiosity, to see what he grows into. But I shall always be glad that I’m a selfish brute of a bachelor; that I never invested in that class of goods.” “Well, you _are_ comforting. You would spoil him more than I do,” said Amanda. “Possibly, but it would be in a different way. I wouldn’t tell him every three minutes that his father was a duke.” “A duke I never mentioned!” the little dressmaker cried, with eagerness. “I never specified any rank, nor said a word about any one in particular. I never so much as insinuated the name of his lordship. But I may have said that if the truth was to be found out, he might be proved to be connected—in the way of cousinship, or something of the kind—with the highest in the land. I should have thought myself wanting if I hadn’t given him a glimpse of that. But there is one thing I have always added—that the truth never _is_ found out.” “You are still more comforting than I!” Mr Vetch exclaimed. He continued to watch her, with his charitable, round-faced smile, and then he said, “You won’t do what I say; so what is the use of my telling you?”