"A loan from Miss Travers?"

"No; Miss Travers wanted to have a share in it, but I begged her not.
It made me happy to do what I did all myself; and Miss Travers felt
for me and did not press. They perhaps think it is Squire Travers
(though he is not a man who would like to say it, for fear it should
bring applicants on him), or some other gentleman who takes an
interest in them."

"I always said you were a grand fellow, Tom. But you are grander
still than I thought you."

"If there be any good in me, I owe it to you, sir. Think what a
drunken, violent brute I was when I first met you. Those walks with
you, and I may say that other gentleman's talk, and then that long
kind letter I had from you, not signed in your name, and written from
abroad,--all these changed me, as the child is changed at nurse."

"You have evidently read a good deal since we parted."

"Yes; I belong to our young men's library and institute; and when of
an evening I get hold of a book, especially a pleasant story-book, I
don't care for other company."

"Have you never seen any other girl you could care for, and wish to
marry?"

"Ah, sir," answered Tom, "a man does not go so mad for a girl as I did
for Jessie Wiles, and when it is all over, and he has come to his
senses, put his heart into joint again as easily as if it were only a