hundred pounds go very far. With great care, and with our thirty
pounds a year, it might last for four or five years, and by that time
Daisy will have grown big, and you, Jasmine, will have grown up,
and--and--perhaps you will have found a magazine to take your poems."

"Oh! oh! I never heard of anything so delicious!" exclaimed Jasmine.
"Long before the five years are out I'll be on the pinnacle of fame.
London will inspire me; oh, it is the home of beauty and delight!
Where is Mrs. Ellsworthy's letter?--we will never finish it? I am
going to burn it on the spot rather than allow any other idea to be
put into your head, Primrose?"

Primrose smiled again, and before she could prevent her, her impetuous
sister had torn Mrs. Ellsworthy's letter into ribbons, and had set
fire to it in the empty grate.

"We must not be too sanguine about London," she said; "only it does
seem the only independent thing to do. Then, too, there is that letter
of dear mamma's and all that sad account of the little baby brother
who was lost so long ago. Hannah says that he was lost in London--he
must be a man now; perhaps we shall meet him in London. It certainly
does seem as if it were right for us to go."




CHAPTER XIV.

QUITE CONTRARY.