He looked at her, brightening, but dubious. “But Whitsuntide? We’d nearly fixed!” She would not let him finish. “What does it matter? There’s heaps of time. I’ll look after your mother. You’ll never get such a chance again.” “No—no. That’s true.” He tried to speak doubtfully, but he could not help smiling at Laura. He liked Laura. He wished, but it did not occur to him to tell her that he wished, that she could come too. “As you say,” he permitted himself to be persuaded, “we can get married any time. But a chance like this——” “Why, of _course_!” said Laura. “And Whitsun would have been a rush anyway. You know, we might have got the whole thing done by now if we’d only thought,” he reproached himself and her. “Oh, well—next autumn—or say Christmas? Christmas is always a slack time. And now about kit——” Together they looted Gamage’s. For the history of the next four months I refer you to Mr. and Mrs. Albert Edward Kimpton, who lived in the brick cottage, darkened with honeysuckle and wild fuchsia, where earwigs dropped friendily on to your shoulder as you stooped your way down a step into the dark little post office to buy peppermints or ask for letters. Albert delivered the letters in the morning, but in the afternoon you bought them from Mrs. Kimpton at the price of a gossip. Albert Edward can bear witness that there was generally a picture postcard for Miss Laura, who had got into the way of meeting him at the gate, on the same day that he had to go up to the Priory with a letter—which was not every week: and Mrs. Kimpton can tell you just how often Mrs. Cloud drove up in the pony cart at three o’clock to fetch groceries, and met Miss Laura in the doorway buying her grandfather his stamps. The months worked out, I think, though I have forgotten Mrs. Kimpton’s figures, at a letter a fortnight to Mrs. Cloud and a postcard in ten days to Laura, besides the stray windfalls in the way of enclosures, generally oological, that supplemented, though Mrs. Kimpton could not know it, Laura’s parish church interiors. They wished, Mrs. Cloud and Laura, that he could have written more regularly, but of course it was his holiday. Once there was a gap of three weeks and five days. But when the letter came it was “so chatty” as Aunt Adela said (there was never anything in Justin’s letters that you could not read aloud) that it would have been churlish to remonstrate, and indeed they did not expect long letters: they merely wished sometimes to themselves, never to each other, that—that—oh, his letters were most interesting but—but——They wanted a woman’s letter, you see, and he was a masculine man. He gave them neatly written facts about scenery and the heights of cliffs, and they wanted him, himself, his thoughts—talking letters. And though they rejoiced to each other that he should be enjoying himself so much, they wanted to be missed. They wanted an inquiry or two.