Maybe, when once she is married, she won't be so ready to chuck her money into every mad scheme that her husband can think of." "Laura is greatly changed," Robert answered; "she has grown much more serious in her ideas." "You wait a bit!" sniggered his father.

"She is a good girl, is Laura, and she knows what she is about.

She's not a girl to let her old dad go to the wall if she can set him right.

It's a pretty state of things," he added bitterly: "here's my daughter going to marry a man who thinks no more of gold than I used to of gun-metal; and here's my son going about with all the money he cares to ask for to help every ne'er-do-well in Staffordshire; and here's their father, who loved them and cared for them, and brought them both up, without money enough very often to buy a bottle of brandy.

I don't know what your poor dear mother would have thought of it." "You have only to ask for what you want." "Yes, as if I were a five-year-old child.