“Ah! that would make us both so much happier!  How good you are!”

“You will see I only wish to help you to help yourself; not to put you under any obligation.  Though I can not see any thing so very terrible in your being slightly indebted to an old woman, who has neither chick nor child, and is at perfect liberty to do what she likes with her own.”

There was a pathos in the tone which smote Hilary into quick contrition.

“Forgive me!  But I have such a horror of borrowing money—­you must know why after what I have told you of our family.  You must surely understand—­”

“I do fully; but there are limits even to independence.  A person who, for his own pleasure, is ready to take money from any body and every body, without the slightest prospect or intention of returning it, is quite different from a friend who in a case of emergency accepts help from another friend, being ready and willing to take every means of repayment, as I knew you were, and meant you to be.  I meant, as you suggested, to stop out of your salary so much per month, till I had my eighty pounds sate back again.”

“But suppose you never had it back?  I am young and strong; still I might fall ill—­I might die, and you never be repaid.”

“Yes, I should,” said Miss Balquidder, with a serious smile.  “You forget, my dear bairn, ’Inasmuch as ye have done it to one of these little ones, ye have done it unto me.’  ’He that giveth to the poor lendeth to the lord.’  I have lent Him a good deal at different times, and He has always paid me back with usury.”

There was something at once solemn and a little sad in the way the old lady spoke.  Hilary forgot her own side of the subject; her pride, her humiliation.

“But do you not think, Miss Balquidder, that one ought to work on, struggle on, to the last extremity, before one accepts an obligation, most of all a money obligation?”

“I do, as a general principle.  Yet money is not the greatest thing in this world, that a pecuniary debt should be the worst to bear.  And sometimes one of the kindest acts you can do to a fellow-creature—­one that touches and softens his heart, nay, perhaps wins it to you for life, is to accept a favor from him.”

Hilary made no reply.

“I speak a little from experience.  I have not had a very happy life myself; at least most people would say so if they knew it; but the Lord has made it up to me by giving me the means of bringing happiness, in money as well as other ways, to other people.  Most of us have our favorite luxuries; this is mine.  I like to do people good; I like, also—­though maybe that is a mean weakness—­to feel that I do it.  If all whom I have been made instrumental in helping had said to me, as you have done, ’I will not be helped, I will not be made happy,’ it would have been rather hard for me.”

And a smile, half humorous, half sad, came over the hard-featured face, spiritualizing its whole expression.