"Well, I want to ask you something, papa," she said, coloring a little, but throwing back her head to look up into his face with her clear, fearless eyes. "How much would it cost for me to take music lessons?"
"Forty dollars a quarter is Miss Ashton's price, I think," answered Mr. Bradford, wondering what this earnest little woman was thinking of now.
"And two quarters would be eighty dollars—and twenty more would be a hundred," slowly and thoughtfully said Bessie, who was not remarkably quick at figures. "That would take two quarters and a half a quarter to make up a hundred dollars, would it not, papa?"
"Yes," answered her father.
"Then," said Bessie, eagerly, "if I wait for my music lessons for two quarters and a half longer, will you let me have the hundred dollars they would cost, papa? I would rather have it; oh, much rather, papa."
"My child," said her father, "what can you possibly want of a hundred dollars? Have you some new charity at heart?"
"No, papa," answered the child with growing earnestness; "it is not a charity, but it is for a secret—not my secret, papa,—you know I would tell you if it was—but another person's secret. And that person is so very deserving, anybody ought to be very glad to do a kindness for that person, and she cannot tell anybody about it—only she told me, and mamma knows I have a secret—and I do want so very much to help her, and I think I would say I would never take music lessons all my life to do it."
And more she poured forth in like incoherent style, pleading too, with eyes and voice and close pressure of her father's hand.
Mr. Bradford was a lawyer of large practice and not a little note, accustomed to deal with knotty problems, and to solve without difficulty much more intricate sums than the putting of this two and two together, and he could guess pretty well in whose behalf Bessie was pleading now. He had heard during the past week of Lena Neville's unaccountable depression and nervousness, and of her refusal to disclose its cause; knew that his little daughters had spent the previous afternoon with her, and that Bessie had returned from Colonel Rush's house with "a weight on her mind," as she always phrased it when she was troubled or anxious, and that even to her mother and Maggie she had not confided the source of that "weight."
To Mr. Bradford, accustomed to the open natures and sweet, affectionate ways of his own daughters, Lena Neville was by no means an attractive child; but so far as he could judge, she was upright and perfectly straightforward, and with no little strength of will and purpose; and petted as she was by her indulgent aunt and uncle, he could not believe that she had brought herself into any difficulty which she could not confess, on her own account.