, I must go now. Rosie!"

"Oh, but you can't go yet. I have lots more to tell you."

"Yessir; but can't you ring for me again?"

In the gravity of the crisis, the remark tickled him; he laughed with a
strange ring in his laughter.

"All right; run away, you sly little puss."

He smiled on as he poured out his tea; finding a relief in prolonging his
sense of the humour of the suggestion, but his heart was heavy, and his
brain a whirl. He did not ring again till he had finished tea.

She came in, and took her gloves out of her pocket.

"No! no!" he cried, strangely exasperated: "An end to this farce! Put
them away. You don't need gloves any more."

She squeezed them into her pocket nervously, and began to clear away the
things, with abrupt movements, looking askance every now and then at the
overcast handsome face.

At last he nerved himself to the task and said: "Well, as I was saying,
Mary Ann, the first thing for you to think of is to make sure of all this
money--this fifteen thousand pounds a year. You see you will be able to
live in a fine manor house--such as the squire lived in in your
village--surrounded by a lovely park with a lake in it for swans and
boats----"

Mary Ann had paused in her work, slop-basin in hand. The concrete
details were beginning to take hold of her imagination.

"Oh, but I should like a farm better," she said. "A large farm with
great pastures and ever so many cows and pigs and outhouses, and a--oh,
just like Atkinson's farm. And meat every day, with pudding on Sundays!
Oh, if father was alive, wouldn't he be glad!"

"Yes, you can have a farm--anything you like."

"Oh, how lovely! A piano?"

"Yes--six pianos."

"And you will learn me?"

He shuddered and hesitated.

"Well--I can't say, Mary Ann."

"Why not? Why won't you? You said you would! You learn Rosie."

"I may not be there, you see," he said, trying to put a spice of
playfulness into his tones.

"Oh, but you will," she said feverishly. "You will take me there. We
will go there instead of where you said--instead of the green waters."
Her eyes were wild and witching.

He groaned inwardly.

"I cannot promise you now," he said slowly. "Don't you see that
everything is altered?"

"What's altered? You are here, and here am I." Her apprehension made
her almost epigrammatic.

"Ah, but you are quite different now, Mary Ann."

"I'm not--I want to be with you just the same."

He shook his head.