l
my troubles by that time."

"I am sure you won't go at all."

"Why not?"

"Because you have got so many friends here."

"Too many, Lady George. Of course you know what Mrs. Jones has been
doing?"

"What has she been doing?"

"She tells you everything, I fancy. She has got it all cut and dry. I'm
to be married next May, and am to spend the honeymoon at Curry Hall. Of
course I'm to leave the army and put the value of my commission into
the three per cents. Mr. Jones is to let me have a place called Clover
Cottage, down in Gloucestershire, and, I believe, I'm to take a farm
and be churchwarden of the parish. After paying my debts we shall have
about two hundred a-year, which of course will be ample for Clover
Cottage. I don't exactly see how I'm to spend my evenings, but I
suppose that will come. It's either that or Perim. Which would you
advise?"

"I don't know what I ought to say."

"Of course I might cut my throat."

"I wish you wouldn't talk in that way. If it's all a joke I'll take it
as a joke."

"It's no joke at all; it's very serious. Mrs. Jones wants me to marry
Guss Mildmay."

"And you are engaged to her?"

"Only on certain conditions,--which conditions are almost impossible."

"What did you say to--Miss Mildmay at Curry Hall?"

"I told her I should go to Perim."

"And what did she say?"

"Like a brick, she offered to go with me, just as the girl offered to
eat the potato parings when the man said that there would not be
potatoes enough for both. Girls always say that kind of thing, though,
when they are taken at their words, they want bonnets and gloves and
fur cloaks."

"And you are going to take her?"

"Not unless I decide upon Clover Cottage. No; if I do go to Perim I
think that I shall manage to go alone."

"If you don't love her, Captain De Baron, don't marry her."

"There's Giblet doing very well, you know; and I calculate I could
spend a good deal of my time at Curry Hall. Perhaps if we made
ourselves useful, they would ask us to Killancodlem. I should manage to
be a sort of factotum to old Jones. Don't you think it would suit me?"

"You can't be serious about it."

"Upon my soul, Lady George, I never was so serious in my life. Do you
think that I mean nothing because I laugh at myself? You know I don't
love her."

"Then say so, and have done with it."

"That is so easy to suggest, but so impossible to do. How is a man to
tell a girl that he doesn't love her after such