t his consent.
'I wish it to be distinctly understood that if you marry Bradshaw it
will be against my consent. But I only ask you to promise me this,
Laetitia, that you won't marry any other man against my consent at
present.' I promised, and he said I was a dutiful daughter. There
won't be any trouble with papa."

"Don't look like it! I say, Tishy, that thousand pounds is very nice.
How much will you have? Forty pounds a year?"

"It's more than that. It's gone up, somehow--sums of money do--or
down. They're never the same as at first. I'm so glad about it. It's
not as if I brought Julius absolutely nothing."

"How much is it?" Sally is under the impression that sums of
money that exist on the word of signed documents only, and whose
materialisation can only be witnessed by bankers, are like fourpence,
one of whose properties is that it _is_ fourpence. They are not
analogous, and Laetitia is being initiated into the higher knowledge.

"Well, dear, you see the stock has gone up, and it's at six
three-quarters. You must ask Julius. He can do the arithmetic."

"Does that mean it's sixty-seven pounds ten?"

"You'd better ask Julius. Then, you know, there's the interest."
Sally asked what interest. "Why, you see, Aunt Priscilla left it
to me eleven years ago, so there's more." But a vendor of mauve
and magenta woollen goods, known to Sally as "the beach-woman,"
was working up towards them.

"That woman never goes when she comes," said Sally. "Let's get
up and go!"

* * * * *

We like lingering over this pleasant little time. It helps on but
little, if at all, with our story. But in years to come this young
couple, who only slip into it by a side-chance, having really little
more to do with it than any of the thousand and one collaterals
that interest the lives of all of us, and come and go and are
forgotten--this Julius and Laetitia will talk of the pleasant three
days or so they had at St. Sennans when they came back from France.
And we, too, having choice of how much we shall tell of those
three or four days, are in little haste to leave them. Those hours
of unblushing idleness under a glorious sun--idleness fostered and
encouraged until it seems one great exertion to call a fly, and
another to subside into it--idleness on matchless moonlight nights,
on land or on water--idleness with an affectation of astronomical
study, just up to speculating on the identity of Aldebaran or Arc