"I am to blame, do not forgive me, I cannot bear it. We are paupers!
Paupers, and I am so miserable. The weddings will never come off;
all that is past; we could not even buy the dentist, now."

A bitter reproach was on Sally's tongue: "I BEGGED you to sell,
but you--" He did not say it; he had not the heart to add a hurt
to that broken and repentant spirit. A nobler thought came to him
and he said:

"Bear up, my Aleck, all is not lost! You really never invested
a penny of my uncle's bequest, but only its unmaterialized future;
what we have lost was only the incremented harvest from that future
by your incomparable financial judgment and sagacity. Cheer up,
banish these griefs; we still have the thirty thousand untouched;
and with the experience which you have acquired, think what you will
be able to do with it in a couple years! The marriages are not off,
they are only postponed."

These are blessed words. Aleck saw how true they were, and their
influence was electric; her tears ceased to flow, and her great spirit
rose to its full stature again. With flashing eye and grateful heart,
and with hand uplifted in pledge and prophecy, she said:

"Now and here I proclaim--"

But she was interrupted by a visitor. It was the editor and proprietor
of the SAGAMORE. He had happened into Lakeside to pay a duty-call upon
an obscure grandmother of his who was nearing the end of her pilgrimage,
and with the idea of combining business with grief he had looked up
the Fosters, who had been so absorbed in other things for the past