Christian, who always took things more easily than his deeper-natured companion, looked at the earnest, strongly-cut face with something like amusement. Luckily, it was too dark for Bram to see the full significance of his companion’s expression. “Marry her? Why, yes, to be sure I hope so. My father is very anxious for me ‘to settle down,’ as he calls it, though I would rather, for my own part, not settle down quite so far as matrimony just yet.” There was a pause. Then Bram said in a dry voice-- “I can’t understand you, Mr. Christian. You seem just as nigh what a man ought to be as a man can be in lots of ways. And I can’t understand how a man like that, that is a man like you, shouldn’t be all on fire to make the girl he loves his wife as quick as he can. Is that a part of my priggishness, Mr. Christian, to wonder at that?” Christian did not answer at once. They had reached the top of the hill, and were standing by the ruined cottages, which looked more desolate than ever in the darkness of the winter evening. The wind whistled through the broken walls and the decaying rafters. Bram remembered the evening when he had heard Christian’s laugh in that very pile. “I suppose it is, Bram,” said Chris at last. “But I rather like it in you, all the same. I can’t help laughing at you, but I think you’re rather a fine fellow. Now, listen to me. You may go on wondering at my behavior as much as you like, but you mustn’t yourself have anything more to do with the Birons. We’ll say I’m jealous, Bram, if you like. I really think it’s true, too,” he added with a flippancy which belied his words. But Bram shook his head solemnly. “No, Mr. Christian,” he answered; and in the excitement he felt the strong Yorkshire accent was heard again in his voice. “You’ve no call to be jealous of me, and you know that right well. If I were a gentleman born, like you----” “Don’t use that expression,‘gentleman born,’ Elshaw,” interrupted Chris lightly. “It means nothing, for one thing. My great-grandfather was a mill hand, or something of that sort, and so were the great-grandfathers of half the men in the House of Lords. And it sounds odd from a man like you, who will be a big pot one of these days.” “Well, Mr. Christian, if I’d been brought up in a big house, like you, and had had my face kept clean and my hair curled instead of being allowed to make mud-pies in the gutter----” “I _wanted_ to make mud-pies in the gutter!” interpolated Christian cheerfully. “Well, you know what I mean, anyhow. If we’d stood just on the same ground----” “We never should have stood on the same ground, Elshaw,” said Chris with a shrewd smile. “----And if I hadn’t been beholden to you for the rise I’ve got, I’d have fought you for the place you’ve got with her very likely. But, as it is, I’m nowhere; I don’t count. And you know that, Mr. Christian.”