hurs toll, except the last,
when I was dreaming of my father, and the chambermaid woke me with a hot
water jug."

"Did she scald you? What a cruel chambermaid! I see you have shaven the
mustachios off."

"Farintosh asked me whether I was going in the army," said Clive, "and
she laughed. I thought I had best dock them. Oh, I would like to cut my
head off as well as my hair!"

"Have you ever asked her to marry you?" asked Clive's friend.

"I have seen her but five times since my return from abroad," the lad
went on; "there has been always somebody by. Who am I? a painter with
five hundred a year for an allowance. Isn't she used to walk up on
velvet and dine upon silver; and hasn't she got marquises and barons,
and all sorts of swells, in her train? I daren't ask her----"

Here his friend hummed Montrose's lines--"He either fears his fate too
much, or his desert is small, who dares not put it to the touch, and win
or lose it all."

"I own I dare not ask her. If she were to refuse me, I know I should
never ask again. This isn't the moment, when all Swelldom is at her
feet, for me to come forward and say, 'Maiden, I have watched thee
daily, and I think thou lovest me well.' I read that ballad to her at
Baden, sir. I drew a picture of the Lord of Burleigh wooing the maiden,
and asked what she would have done?"

"Oh, you did? I thought, when we were at Baden, we were so modest that
we did not even whisper our condition?"

"A fellow can't help letting it be seen and hinting it," says Clive,
with another blush. "They can read it in our looks fast enough; and what
is going on in our minds, hang them! I recollect she said, in her grave,
cool way, that after all the Lord and Lady of Burleigh did not seem to
have made a very good marriage, and that the lady would have been much
happier in marrying one of her own degree."

"That was a very prudent saying for a young lady of eighteen," remarks
Clive's friend.

"Yes; but it was not an unkind one. Say Ethel thought--thought what was
the case; and being engaged herself, and knowing how friends of mine had
provided a very pretty little partner for me--she is a dear, good
little girl, little Rosey; and twice as good, Pen, when her mother is
away--knowing this and that, I say, suppose Ethel wanted to give me a
hint to keep quiet, was she not right in the counsel she gave me? She
is not fit to be a poor man's wife. Fancy Ethel Newcome going into the
kitchen and making pies like