e was a good deal heavier now, he reflected, and yet--

Reggie had come to the parting of the ways, and had decided which he
would follow.

Like most ambitious young men he had, so far, taken as his motto a
couplet, which, through over-usage, has become a platitude--

"High hopes faint on a warm hearth-stone,
He travels the fastest who travels alone."

Reggie had accepted this as an incontrovertible truth impossible to
dispute; but then he had never until lately felt the smallest desire to
travel through life accompanied by any one person. He had fallen in
and out of love as often as was wholesome or possible for so
hard-working a young man, and always looked upon the experience as an
agreeable relaxation, as it undoubtedly is. But never for one moment
did he allow such evanescent attachments to turn him a hair's breadth
out of his course. Now something had happened to him, and he knew that
for the future the platitude had become a lie, and that the only
incentive either to high hopes or their fulfilment lay in the prospect
of a hearth-stone shared by the girl who a few hours ago declared that
she "would not like to fall into that man's hands."

Reggie was very modern. He built no altar to Mary in his heart nor did
he set her image in a sacred shrine apart. He had no use for anyone in
a shrine. He wanted a comrade, and he craved this particular comrade
with all the intensity of a well-disciplined, entirely practical
nature. He was not in the least conceited, but he knew that if he
lived he would "get there," and the fact that he never had had, or ever
would have, sixpence beyond the pay he earned did not deter him in his
quest a single whit. Mary wouldn't have sixpence either. He knew the
Redmarley rent-roll to a halfpenny. Mrs Ffolliot frankly talked over
her affairs with him ever since he left Woolwich, and more than once
his shrewd judgment unravelled some tangle which Mr Ffolliot's
singularly unbusiness-like habits had created. He knew very well that
were it not for General Grantly the boys could never have got the
chance each was to get. That General Grantly was spending the money he
would have left his daughter at his death in helping her children now
when they needed it most. Mary and he were young and strong. They
could rough it at first. Afterwards--he had no fears about that
afterwards if Mary cared.

But would Mary care?

Reggie felt none of the qualms of a more sensitive man in m