! I can't preach and I have no money of my own. Dearest, I
ought never to have told you."

"Told me what?" inquired Eileen softly. She knew quite well; but she was
a woman, and a woman can never let well enough alone.

The curate, turning to Eileen, delivered himself of a statement of three
words. Eileen's reply was a softly whispered _Tu quoque!_

"It had to happen, dear," she added cheerfully, for she did not share
the curate's burden of responsibility in the matter. "If you had not
told me we should have been miserable separately. Now that you have told
me, we can be miserable together. And when two people who--who--" She
hesitated.

The curate supplied the relative sentence. Eileen nodded her head in
acknowledgment.

"Yes; who are--like you and me--are miserable together, they are happy!
See?"

"I see," said the curate gravely. "Yes, you are right there; but we
can't go on living on a diet of joint misery. We shall have to face the
future. What are we going to do about it?"

Then Eileen spoke up boldly for the first time.

"Gerald," she said, "we shall simply have to manage on a hundred a
year."

But the curate shook his head.

"Dearest, I should be an utter cad if I allowed you to do such a thing,"
he said. "A hundred a year is less than two pounds a week!"

"A lot of people live on less than two pounds a week," Eileen pointed
out longingly.

"Yes; I know. If we could rent a three-shilling cottage and I could go
about with a spotted handkerchief round my neck, and you could scrub the
doorsteps _coram populo_, we might be very comfortable; but the clergy
belong to the black-coated class, and people in the lower ranks of the
black-coated class are the poorest people in the whole wide world. They
have to spend money on luxuries--collars and charwomen, and so
on--which a workingman can spend entirely on necessities. It wouldn't
merely mean no pretty dresses and a lot of hard work for you, Eileen. It
would mean starvation! Believe me--I know! Some of my friends have tried
it--and I know!"

"What happened to them?" asked Eileen fearfully.

"They all had to come down in the end--some soon, some late, but all in
time--to taking parish relief."

"Parish relief?"

"Yes; not official, regulation, rate-aided charity, but the infinitely
more humiliating charity of their well-to-do neighbors--quiet checks,
second-hand dresses, and things like that. No, little girl; you and I
are too proud--too proud of the