"But she will give me a shilling toward a new sash," was the girl's answer, and Archie replied:
"I'll give you the shilling; don't go," and he put his hand in his pocket for the shilling, which Daisy knew was not there, for the poverty of the McPhersons of Stoneleigh was no secret in the neighborhood any more than was the pride which kept them so poor.
She had often heard both discussed by her mother's customers, and when Archie said, as he withdrew his hand empty, "Plague on it, what a bother it is never to have any money; I wish we were not so poor. I wonder how I can make a fortune; I've thought of forty ways," she asked saucily:
"Did you ever think of going to work?"
"To work! To work!" he repeated, slowly, as if not fully comprehending her, "I don't think I quite know what you mean."
"I mean," she replied, "that if you have no money, and want some, why don't you go to work and earn it like Giles, the tailor, or Jones, the baker? It would not hurt you one bit."
"That is rich!" Archie exclaimed, sitting upright for the first time and laughing immoderately. "The best thing I have heard. Ask Lady Jane, or Uncle John, or even Anthony, how they would like to have a McPherson turn baker, or tailor, or tinker."
"You know I did not mean you to be any of these," the girl answered, a little indignantly; "but you might do something. You can go to London and be a clerk in that big store, Marshall & Snellgrove's. That would not be hard, nor spoil your hands."
"I am afraid it would, little Daze," the boy replied. "You will have to try again. It would never do for a McPherson to be in trade. We were not born to it. How would gambling suit you? Piles of money are made that way."
"Gambling!" Daisy repeated, and could Miss Betsey McPherson have seen the scorn which flashed in the eyes of Daisy Allen, she would have forgiven the Daisy McPherson whom she saw years after upon the terrace at Aberystwyth flirting with Lord Hardy.