bridge, he touched it--"

"A scamp!" said Dick, grinding an imaginary human frame to powder.

"And then he looked at me, and at last he said, 'Are you in love with
Dick Dewy?' And I said, 'Perhaps I am!' and then he said, 'I wish you
weren't then, for I want to marry you, with all my soul.'"

"There's a villain now! Want to marry you!" And Dick quivered with the
bitterness of satirical laughter. Then suddenly remembering that he
might be reckoning without his host: "Unless, to be sure, you are willing
to have him,--perhaps you are," he said, with the wretched indifference
of a castaway.

"No, indeed I am not!" she said, her sobs just beginning to take a
favourable turn towards cure.

"Well, then," said Dick, coming a little to his senses, "you've been
stretching it very much in giving such a dreadful beginning to such a
mere nothing. And I know what you've done it for,--just because of that
gipsy-party!" He turned away from her and took five paces decisively, as
if he were tired of an ungrateful country, including herself. "You did
it to make me jealous, and I won't stand it!" He flung the words to her
over his shoulder and then stalked on, apparently very anxious to walk to
the remotest of the Colonies that very minute.

"O, O, O, Dick--Dick!" she cried, trotting after him like a pet lamb, and
really seriously alarmed at last, "you'll kill me! My impulses are
bad--miserably wicked,--and I can't help it; forgive me, Dick! And I
love you always; and those times when you look silly and don't seem quite
good enough for me,--just the same, I do, Dick! And there is something
more serious, though not concerning that walk with him."

"Well, what is it?" said Dick, altering his mind about walking to the
Colonies; in fact, passing to the other extreme, and standing so rooted
to the road that he was apparently not even going home.

"Why this," she said, drying the beginning of a new flood of tears she
had been going to shed, "this is the serious part. Father has told Mr.
Shiner that he would like him for a son-in-law, if he could get me;--that
he has his right hearty consent to come courting me!"

CHAPTER IV: AN ARRANGEMENT

"That is serious," said Dick, more intellectually than he had spoken for
a long time.

The truth was that Geoffrey knew nothing about his daughter's continued
walks and meetings with Dick. When a hint that there were symptoms of an
attachment between them had first reached Geof