The weeks went on. Roland Yorke was hard at work, carrying out his resolve of "putting his shoulder to the wheel." Vague ideas of getting into something good, by which a fortune might be made, floated through his brain in rose-coloured clouds. What the something was to be he did not exactly know; meanwhile, as a preliminary to it, he sought and obtained copying from Greatorex and Greatorex, to be done in spare hours at home. Of which fact Roland (unlike Mr. Brown) made no secret; he talked of it to the whole office; and Mr. Brown supplied him openly.

It was an excessively hot evening, getting now towards dusk. Roland had carried his work to Mrs. Jones\'s room, not so much because his own parlour was rather close and stuffy, as that he might obtain slight intervals of recreative gossip. He had it to himself, however, for Mrs. Jones was absent on household cares. The window looked on a backyard, in which the maid, who had come out, was hanging up a red table-cover to dry, that had evidently had something spilled on it. Of course Roland arrested his pen to watch the process. He was sitting in his shirtsleeves, and had just complained aloud that it was hotter than Africa.

"Who did that?" he called out through the open window. "You?"

"Mr. Ollivera, sir. He upset some ink; and mistress have been washing the place out in layers of cold water. She don\'t think it\'ll show."

"What d\'ye call layers?"

"Different lots, sir. About nineteen bowlfuls she swilled it through; and me a emptying of \'em at the sink, and droring off fresh water ready to her hand."

The hanging-out and pulling the damaged part straight took a tolerably long time; Roland, in the old seduction of any amusement being welcome as an accompaniment to work, continued to look on and talk. Suddenly, he remembered his copying, and the young lady for whose sake he had undertaken the labour.

"This is not sticking to it," he soliloquised. "And if I am to have her, I must work for her. Won\'t I work, that\'s all! I\'ll stick to it like any brick! But this copying is poor stuff to get a fellow on. If I could only slip into something better!"

Considering that Mr. Roland Yorke\'s earnings the past week, what with mistakes and other failures, had been one shilling and ninepence, and the week previous to that fifteenpence, it certainly did not look as though the copying would prove the high road to fortune. He began casting about other projects in his mind, as he wrote.

"If they\'d give me a place under Government, it would be the very thing. But they don\'t. Old Dick Yorke\'s as selfish as a camel, and Carrick\'s hiding his head, goodness knows where. So I am thrown on my own resources. Bless us all! when a fellow wants to get on in this world, he can\'t."

At this juncture Roland came to the end of his paper. As it was a good opportunity for taking a little respite, he laid down his pen, and exercised his thoughts.

"There\'s those photographing places--lots of them springing up. You can\'t turn a corner into a street but you come bang upon a fresh establishment. They can\'t require a fellow to have any previous knowledge, they can\'t. I wonder if any of them would take me on, and give me a couple of guineas a-week, or so? Nothing to do there, but talk to the visitors, and take their faces. I should make a good hand at that. But, perhaps, she\'d not like it! She might object to marry a man of that sort. What a difficulty it is to get into anything! I must think of the other plan."

The other plan meant some nice place under Government. To Roland that always seemed a sure harbour of refuge. The doubt was, how to get it?

"There\'s young Dick--Vincent, as he likes to be called now," soliloquised Roland. "I\'ve never asked him to help me, but perhaps he might: he\'s not ill-natured where his pocket\'s not called in question. I\'ll go to him tomorrow; see if I don\'t. Now then, are you dry?"

This was to the writing. Roland rose up to get more paper, and then found that he had left it behind him at the office--some that he ought to have brought home.

"There\'s a bother! I wonder if I could get it by going round? Of course the offices are closed, but I\'d not mind asking Bede for the key if he\'s in the way."

To think and to act were one with Roland. He put on his coat, took his hat, and went hastening along on his expedition. Rather to his surprise, as he drew to his walk\'s end, his quick eyes, casting themselves into dark spots as well as light ones, caught sight of Bede Greatorex standing in the shade opposite his house, apparently watching its lighted windows, from which sounds of talking and laughing issued forth. Roland conjectured that some gaiety was as usual going on in the house, which its master would escape. Over he went to him, without ceremony.

"You don\'t like all that, sir?" he said, indicating the supposed company.

"Not too much of it," replied Bede Greatorex, startled out of his reverie by the unexpected address. "The fact is," he condescended to explain to his curious clerk, perhaps as an excuse for standing there, "certain matters have been giving me trouble of late. I was in deep thought."

"Mrs. Bede Greatorex does love society: she did as Louisa Joliffe," remarked Roland, meaning to be confidential.

"I was not thinking of Mrs. Bede Greatorex, but of the loss from my office," spoke his master in a cold, proud tone of reproof.

Crossing the road, as if declining further conversation, he went in. Roland saw he had offended him, and wished his tongue had been tied, laying down his thoughtless speech as usual to the having sojourned at Port Natal. It might not be a propitious moment for requesting the loan of the office keys, and Roland had the sense to foresee it.

Who should come out of the house at that moment, but Annabel Channing, attended by a servant. The sight of her put work, keys, and all else, out of Roland\'s head. He leaped across, seized her hands, and learnt that she had got leave to spend the evening with Hamish and his wife.

"I\'ll take care of you; I\'ll see you safely there," cried Roland, impetuously. "You can go back, old Dalla."

Old Dalla--a middle-aged yellow woman who had brought Jane Greatorex from India and remained with the child as her attendant--made no more ado, but took him at his word; glad to be spared the walk, she turned indoors at once. And before Annabel well knew what had occurred, she found herself being whirled away by Roland in an opposite direction to the one she wished to go. It was only twilight yet. Roland had her securely on his arm, and began to pace the square. To say the truth, he looked on the meeting as a special chance, for he had not once set eyes on the young lady, save in the formal presence of others, since that avowal of his a fortnight ago, in Mr. Greatorex\'s room.

"What are you doing?" she asked, when she could collect herself "This is not the way to Hamish\'s."

"This is the way to get a few words with you, Annabel; one can\'t talk in the streets with its glare and its people. We are private here; and I\'ll take you to Hamish\'s in a minute or two."

In this impulsive fashion, he began telling her his plans and his dreams. That he had determined to make an income and a home for her: as a beginning, until something better turned up, he was working all his spare time at copying deeds, "nearly night and day." One less unsophisticated than Roland Yorke, might have suppressed a small item of the programme--that which related to Annabel\'s contributing to the fund herself, by obtaining pupils. Not he. He avowed it just as openly as his own intention of getting "something under Government." In short, Roland made the young lady a regular offer. Or, rather, did not so much make the offer, as assume that it had been already made, and was, so far, settled. His arguments were sensible; his plans looked really feasible; the day-dreams tolerably bright.

"But I have not said I would have you yet," spoke Annabel all in a flutter, when she could get a word in edgeways. "You should not make so sure of things."

"Not make sure of it! Not have me!" cried Roland, in indignant remonstrance. "Now look you here, Annabel--you know you\'ll have me: it is all nonsense to make believe you won\'t. I don\'t suppose I\'ve asked you in the proper way, or put things in the proper light; but you ought to make allowance for a fellow who has had his manners knocked out of him at Port Natal. When the time arrives that I\'ve got a little house and a few chairs and tables in its rooms, you\'ll come home to me and I\'ll try and make you happy in it, and work for you till I drop! There! If I knew how to say it better, I would: and you need not despise a man for his incapable way of putting it. Not have me! I\'d like to know who you would have, if not me!"

Annabel Channing offered no farther remonstrance. That she had contrived to fall in love with Roland Yorke, and would rather marry him than anybody else in the world, she knew all too well. The home and the chairs and the tables in it, and the joint working together to keep it going, wore a bright vista to her heart, looked at from a distance with youth\'s hopeful eyes. But she did not speak: and Roland, mistaking her silence, regarded it as a personal injury.

"When I and Arthur are the dearest friends in the world! He\'d give you to me off-hand; I know it. It is not kind of you, Annabel. We engaged ourselves to each other when you were a little one and I was a tall donkey of fourteen, and if I\'ve ever thought of a wife at all since I grew up, it was of you. I have done nothing but think of you since I came back. I wonder how you\'d feel if I turned round and said, \'I don\'t know that I shall have you.\' Not jovial, I know."

"You should not bring up the nonsense we said when we were children," returned Annabel, at a loss what else to answer. "I\'m sure I could not have been above seven. We were playing at oranges and lemons: I remember the evening quite well: and you----"

"Now just you be open, Annabel, and say what it is your mind\'s harbouring against me," interrupted Roland, in a tone of deep feeling. "Is it that twenty-pound note of old Galloway\'s?--or is it because I went knocking about at Port Natal?"

"Oh, Roland, how foolish you are! As if I could think of either!"

And there was something in the words and tone, in the pretty, shy, blushing face that reassured Roland. From that moment he looked upon matters as irrevocably settled, gave Annabel\'s hand a squeeze against his side, and went on to enlarge upon his dreams of the future.

"I\'ve taken counsel with myself and with Mrs. J., and I don\'t think the pair of us are likely to be led astray by romance, Annabel, for she is one of the strong-minded ones. She agrees with me that we might do well on three hundred a year; and, what with my work and your pupils, we could make that easily. But, I said to her, let\'s be on the safe side, and put it down at only two hundred. Just to begin with, you know, Annabel. She said, \'Yes, we might do on that if we were both economical\'--and I\'m sure if I\'ve not learnt to be that I\'ve learnt nothing. I would not risk the temptation of giving away--which I am afraid I\'m prone to--for you should be cash-keeper, Annabel; just as Mrs. J. keeps my sovereign a week now. My goodness! the having no money in one\'s pocket is a safeguard. When I see things in the shop windows, whether it\'s eatables, or what not, I remember my lack of cash, and pass on. I stopped to look at a splendid diamond necklace yesterday in Regent Street, and thought how much I should like to get it for you; but with empty pockets, where was the use of going in to enquire the price?"

"I do not care for diamonds," said Annabel.

"You will have them some time, I hope, when my fortune\'s made. But about the two hundred a year? Mrs. J. said if we could be sure of making that regularly, she thought we might risk it; only, she said there might be interruptions. It would not be Mrs. J. if she didn\'t croak."

"Interruptions!" exclaimed Annabel, something as Roland had interrupted Mrs. Jones, and quite as unsuspicious as he. "Of what kind?"

"Sickness, Mrs. J. mentioned, and--but I don\'t think I\'ll tell you that," considered Roland. "Let\'s say, and general contingencies. I\'m sure I should as soon have thought of setting up a menagerie of owls, but for her putting it into my head. A fellow who has helped to land boats at Port Natal can\'t be expected to foresee everything. Would you be afraid to encounter the two hundred a year?"

"I fear mamma would for me. And Hamish."

"Now Annabel, don\'t you get bringing up objections for other people. Time enough for that when they come down with them of their own accord. I intend to speak to Hamish tonight if I can get the opportunity. I don\'t want you to keep your promise a secret. You are a dear good girl, and the little home shall be ours before a twelvemonth\'s gone by, if I have to work my hands off."

The little home! Poor Roland! If he could but have foreseen what twelve months would bring forth.

Hamish Channing\'s book had come out under more favourable auspices than Gerald\'s. The publisher, far from demanding money in advance for expenses, had made fair terms with him. Of course the result would depend on the sale. When Hamish held the first copies in his hand, his whole being was lighted up with silent enthusiasm; the joy it was to bring, the appreciation, had already set in. He sent a copy to his mother; and he sent one to Gerald Yorke, with a brief, kind note: in the simplicity of his heart, he supposed Gerald would rejoice, just as he at first had rejoiced for him.

How good the book was, Hamish knew. The publisher knew. The world, Hamish thought, would soon know. He did not deceive himself in its appreciation, or exaggerate the real worth and merits of the work: in point of fact, the praise meted out to Gerald\'s would have been really applicable to his. Never did Hamish, even in his moments of extremest doubt and diffidence, cast a thought to the possibility that his book would be cried down. Already he was thinking of beginning a second; and his other work, the occasional papers, went on with a zest.

He sat with his little girl, Nelly, on his knee, on this selfsame evening that Roland had pounced on Annabel. The child had her blue eyes and her bright face turned to him as she chattered. He looked down fondly at her and stroked the pretty curls of her golden hair.

"And when will the ship be home, papa?"

"Very soon now. It is nearing the port."

"But when will it be quite, quite, quite home?"

"In a few days, I think, Nelly. I am not sure, but I ought to say it has come."

"It was those books that came in the parcel last night?" said shrewd little Nelly.

"Even so, darling."

"Mamma has been reading them all day. I saw"--Nelly put her sweet face close up and dropped her voice--"I saw her crying at places of them."

A soft faint crimson stole into Hamish Channing\'s cheeks; his lips parted, his breath came quicker; a sudden radiance illuminated his whole countenance. This whisper of the child\'s brought to his heart its first glad sense of that best return--appreciation.

Company arrived to interrupt the quiet home happiness. Mrs. Gerald Yorke and her three meek children. Winny had a face of distress, and made a faint apology for bringing the little ones, but it was over early to leave them in bed. Close upon this, Roland and Annabel entered, and had the pleasure of being in time to hear Gerald\'s wife tell out her grievances.

They were of the old description. No money, importunate creditors, Gerald unbearably cross. Annabel felt inclined to smile; Roland was full of sympathy. Had the prospective fortune (that he was sure to make) been already in his hands, he would have given a purse of gold to Winny, and carried off the three little girls to a raree-show there and then. The next best thing was to promise them the treat: which he did largely.

"And me too, Roland," cried eager Nelly, dancing in and out amid the impromptu visitors in the highest glee, her shining curls never still.

"Of course you," said Roland to the fair child who had come to an anchor before him, flinging her arms upon his knees. "I\'d not go anywhere without you, you know, Nelly. If I were not engaged to somebody else, I\'d make you my little wife."

"Who is the somebody else? Kitty?"

"Not Kitty. She\'s too litt............