“There—­are four reasons against your spending your income exactly as you please; unless, indeed, part of your plan be to provide for them,” answered Charles very seriously.

“I am sure,” observed Mrs. Adams, with the half-offended air of a weak woman when she hears the truth, “John need not be told his duty to his children; he has always been a most affectionate father.”

“A father may be fond and foolish,” said Charles, who was peculiarly English in his mode of giving an opinion.  “For my part, I could not kiss my little Mary and Anne when I go to bed at night, if I did not feel I had already formed an accumulating fund for their future support—­a support they will need all the more when their parents are taken from them, as they must be, in the course of time.”

“They must marry,” said Mrs. Adams.

“That is a chance,” replied Charles; “women hang on hands now-a-days.  At all events, by God’s blessing, I am resolved that, if they are beauties, they shall never be forced by poverty to accept unworthy matches; if they are plain, they shall have enough to live upon without husbands.”

“That is easy enough for you, Charles,” said the doctor, “who have had your broad acres to support you, and no necessity for expenditure or show of any kind; who might go from Monday morning till Saturday night in home-spun, and never give any thing beyond home-brewed and gooseberry wine, with a chance bottle of port to your visiters—­while I, Heaven help me! was obliged to dash in a well-appointed equipage, entertain, and appear to be doing a great deal in my profession, when a guinea would pine in solitude for a week together in my pocket.”

“I do not want to talk with you of the past, John,” said Charles; “our ideas are more likely to agree now than they were ten or twelve years ago; I will speak of the future and present.  You are now out of debt, in the very prime of life, and in the receipt of a splendid income; but do not, let me entreat you, spend it as it comes; lay by something for those children; provide for them either by insurance, or some of the many means that are open to us all.  Do not, my dear brother, be betrayed by health, or the temptation for display, to live up to an income the nature of which is so essentially precarious.”

“Really,” murmured Mrs. Adams, “you put one into very low spirits.”

Charles remained silent, waiting his brother’s reply.

“My dear Charles,” he said at last, “there is a great deal of truth in what you say—­certainly a great deal; but I cannot change my style of living, strange as it may seem.  If I did, I should lose my practice.  And then I must educate my children; that is an imperative duty, is it not?”

“Certainly it is; it is a part of the provision I have spoken of, but not the whole—­a portion only.  If you have the means to do both, it is your duty to do both; and you have the means.  Nay, my dear sister, do not seem angry or annoyed with me; it is for the sake of your children I speak; it is to prevent their ever knowing practically what we do know theoretically—­that the world is a hard world; hard and unfeeling to those who need its aid.  It is to prevent the possibility of their feeling a reverse.”