"Then there's Rocket," the colonel had said, "Hugh cannot buy him back, and he's so bound up in him too, poor Hugh, poor all of us," and the colonel had wrung Alice's hand, hurrying off ere she had time to suggest what all along had been in her mind.
"It does not matter," she thought.

"A surprise will be quite as pleasant, and then Mr.Liston may object to it as a silly girl's fancy." This was the previous night, and now this morning another demand had come in the shape of Muggins weeping in her lap, of Lulu begging to be saved from 'Lina Worthington, and from 'Lina herself asking Hugh for the money Alice knew he had not got.
"But I have," she whispered, "and I will send it too." Just then Adah came up the stairs, and Alice called her in, asking if she still wished to go to Terrace Hill.
"Yes, more than ever," Adah replied.

"Hugh is rational, I hear, so I can talk to him about it before long.

You must be present, as I'm sure he will oppose it." Meantime in the sickroom there was an anxious consultation between mother and son touching the fifty dollars which must be raised for Nellie Tiffton's sake.
"Were it not that I feel bound by honor to pay that debt, 'Lina might die before I'd send her a cent," said Hugh, his eyes blazing with anger as he recalled the contents of 'Lina's letter.
But how should they raise the fifty?
Alice's bills had been paid regularly thus far, paid so delicately too, so as a matter of right, that Mrs.Worthington, who knew how sadly it was needed in their present distress, had accepted it unhesitatingly, but Hugh's face flushed with a glow of shame when he heard from his mother's lips that Alice was really paying them her board.
"It makes me hate myself," he said, groaning aloud, "that I should suffer a girl like her to pay for the bread she eats.

Oh, poverty, poverty! It is a bitter drug to swallow." Then like a brave man who saw the evil and was willing to face it, Hugh came back to the original point, "Where should they get the money ?" "He might borrow it of Alice, as 'Lina suggested," Mrs.Worthington said, timidly, while Hugh almost leaped upon the floor.
"Never, mother, never! Miss Johnson shall not be made to pay our debts.
There's Uncle John's gold watch, left as a kind of heirloom, and very dear on that account.