ry on?"

"What IS the good?" she began.

"Would you marry on three hundred a year?"

She looked at me for a moment. "That's six pounds a week," she said.
"One could manage on that, easily. Smithie's brother--No, he only gets
two hundred and fifty. He married a typewriting girl."

"Will you marry me if I get three hundred a year?"

She looked at me again, with a curious gleam of hope.

"IF!" she said.

I held out my hand and looked her in the eyes. "It's a bargain," I said.

She hesitated and touched my hand for an instant. "It's silly," she
remarked as she did so. "It means really we're--" She paused.

"Yes?" said I.

"Engaged. You'll have to wait years. What good can it do you?"

"Not so many years." I answered.

For a moment she brooded.

Then she glanced at me with a smile, half-sweet, half-wistful, that has
stuck in my memory for ever.

"I like you!" she said. "I shall like to be engaged to you."

And, faint on the threshold of hearing, I caught her ventured "dear!"
It's odd that in writing this down my memory passed over all that
intervened and I feel it all again, and once again I'm Marion's boyish
lover taking great joy in such rare and little things.

VI

At last I went to the address my uncle had given me in Gower Street, and
found my aunt Susan waiting tea for him.

Directly I came into the room I appreciated the change in outlook that
the achievement of Tono-Bungay had made almost as vividly as when I
saw my uncle's new hat. The furniture of the room struck upon my eye as
almost stately. The chairs and sofa were covered with chintz which gave
it a dim, remote flavour of Bladesover; the mantel, the cornice, the
gas pendant were larger and finer than the sort of thing I had grown
accustomed to in London. And I was shown in by a real housemaid with
real tails to her cap, and great quantities of reddish hair. There was
my aunt too looking bright and pretty, in a blue-patterned tea-wrap with
bows that seemed to me the quintessence of fashion. She was sitting in
a chair by the open window with quite a pile of yellow-labelled books
on the occasional table beside her. Before the large, paper-decorated
fireplace stood a three-tiered cake-stand displaying assorted cakes,
and a tray with all the tea equipage except the teapot, was on the large
centre-table. The carpet was thick, and a spice of adventure was given
it by a number of dyed sheep-skin mats.

"Hello!" said my aunt as I appeared. "It's