"I mean to get on, and I will," he repeated. "Anybody can who chooses. I have to begin at the bottom of the ladder: but that's no reason why I shouldn't got to the top some day. Anyhow, I don't mean to be easily beaten. If I take this thing now, it is only as a stepping-stone to something better. I shall not be a bookseller's accountant all my days."
There was a touch of egoism in all this, but egoism is almost an essential part of youth, and the boy was thinking of others besides himself. "I wouldn't have written to Dr. Bryant in your place,—after the way he treated my father and your mother. But if you thought it best—"
"I could not see what else to do. It is hard enough to ask help of anybody. For myself I would not—only for you and Lettice."
"Not for me. I can do without him, thank goodness! I wouldn't touch a dirty penny of the old fellow's with a pair of tongs! Not for anything you could mention," declared Felix, with unnecessary vehemence. "It is different for you and Lettice. Not that I couldn't have kept you both."
"On seventeen shillings and sixpence a week! Forty-five pounds a year!"
"It will be a pound a week soon. Besides, I shall make more somehow. Something would have turned up," said Felix, with juvenile hopefulness. "And in time, you will be able to teach again,—not a great deal so as to knock yourself up, but enough to be a help. I mean to have a home for you both before long."
The faded woman, lying on a sofa near the fire—faded, though scarcely thirty-five in age—knew better. She was too well aware that the prospective home would not be for her.
It was a shabby little room: a most ordinary specimen of a second-rate lodging-house "parlour" in a dull back street of Brighton. Yet there was about it a certain refinement of air and tone. Cecilia Anderson was a lady, both by birth and by education: and her personality told upon her surroundings. Rows of well-bound books spoke of better days: and a graceful arrangement of moss and ferns gave evidence of somebody's love for beauty. Moreover, the three present, though to some extent shabby, were also scrupulously neat; and while work lay about, it was not flung about: and neither table-cloth nor carpet was bestrewn with the shreds of white cotton, too often seen in the wake of tasteless females.
Lettice had not spoken yet. She knew well that Felix's opinion, not hers, was the important question, even though her future might be more acutely affected than his by the correspondence between Miss Anderson and Dr. Bryant. Not being self-assertive, she was in no haste to thrust herself into the discussion, but sat quietly, work in hand, glancing between the stitches from one to the other.
"What did uncle Bryant do?" she at length asked, in the rather long silence following her brother's last words.