"Ten shillings! Spendthrift!" "Too much! she looked as you might look if one offered you ten shillings for your picture of 'Julius Caesar considering whether he should cross the Rubicon.' But when the manager had declared her to be his property, and appointed you to call to-morrow,--implying that he was to be paid for allowing her to sit,--her countenance became overcast, and she muttered sullenly, 'I'll not sit; I'll not!' Then she turned to her grandfather, and something very quick and close was whispered between the two; and she pulled me by the sleeve, and said in my ear--oh, but so eagerly!--'I want three pounds, sir,--three pounds!--if he would give three pounds; and come to our lodgings,--Mr.Merle, Willow Lane.

Three pounds,--three!' And with those words hissing in my ear, and coming from that fairy mouth, which ought to drop pearls and diamonds, I left her," added Lionel, as gravely as if he were sixty, "and lost an illusion!" "Three pounds!" cried Vance, raising his eyebrows to the highest arch of astonishment, and lifting his nose in the air towards the majestic moon,--"three pounds!--a fabulous sum! Who has three pounds to throw away?
Dukes, with a hundred thousand a year in acres, have not three pounds to draw out of their pockets in that reckless, profligate manner.
Three pounds!--what could I not buy for three pounds?
I could buy the Dramatic Library, bound in calf, for three pounds; I could buy a dress coat for three pounds (silk lining not included); I could be lodged for a month for three pounds! And a jade in tinsel, just entering on her teens, to ask three pounds for what?
for becoming immortal on the canvas of Francis Vance ?--bother!" Here Vance felt a touch on his shoulder.

He turned round quickly, as a man out of temper does under similar circumstances, and beheld the sweat face of the Cobbler.
"Well, master, did not she act fine ?--how d'ye like her ?" "Not much in her natural character; but she sets a mighty high value on herself." "Anan, I don't take you." "She'll not catch me taking her! Three pounds!--three kingdoms! Stay," cried Lionel to the Cobbler; "did not you say she lodged with you?
Are you Mr.Merle ?" "Merle's my name, and she do lodge with me,--Willow Lane." "Come this way, then, a few yards down the road,--more quiet.

Tell me what the child means, if you can;" and Lionel related the offer of his friend, the reply of the manager, and the grasping avarice of Miss Juliet Araminta.
The Cobbler made no answer; and when the young friends, surprised at his silence, turned to look at him, they saw he was wiping his eyes with his sleeves.
"Poor little thing!" he said at last, and still more pathetically than he had uttered the same words at her appearance in front of the stage; "'tis all for her grandfather; I guess,--I guess." "Oh," cried Lionel, joyfully, "I am so glad to think that.

It alters the whole case, you see, Vance." "It don't alter the case of the three pounds," grumbled Vance.