“That’s so!” and Daisy nodded approvingly; then she went on:  “Mother has made some lemon jelly for the dinner, because Dorothy says she makes it so nice, and I am going over this evening to wash the dishes and help Dorothy a little.”

“You?  I wouldn’t!” Archie said, looking reflectingly at her.

“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.

But the Daisy of the Marine Terrace was a very different person from the young girl who, with a hand upon each hip and her head on one side, gave Archie a piece of her mind in terms neither mild nor selected.

“Gambling!  I’d never speak to you again if you stooped to such a thing as to play for money.  You’d better a thousand times sell butcher’s meat at the corner, or cry gooseberries in the street!  Suppose you are a gentleman, a McPherson, without money, must you either gamble, or sit still and let some one else take care of you?  It won’t hurt you to work any more than any body else, and you’ll have to do something.  Every body says so.  Suppose you do have Stoneleigh when your father dies; there are only a few acres besides the park, and they are all run down.  What are you going to do?”