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34 been brought to our door, to sic a place as the Destitute Asylum."

"Don't speak of such a thing as the Destitute Asylum," said Mrs. Hammond, with a curious expression on her face that her husband could not read. "There may be some insurance money or something coming that would defray the girl's passage to England."

"Insurance? That might be forfeited by a man's going abroad," said Mr. Hammond. "I know he is poor, for he told me so, and he was particularly anxious about this child, that he might continue her education himself, because she was not provided for."

"Well," said Hugh Lindsay, "as the good wife says, the bairn is welcome to stop at Branxholm, if ye dinna think she has mair claims on ye, for it was on your business and in your employment, as one may say, that her father came to his end."

"True enough," said Mrs. Hammond, taking the words out of her husband's mouth, "we should be bound to make you some compensation if you were good enough to keep the child. It is neither the expense nor the trouble that I think of, but I am so careful of my children, that I must know whom they associate with. But we would pay a reasonable board."

"That's fair enough," said Hugh Lindsay.