"I'm going to take you to see mother. I promised her I would," said Aubrey. "Before going away I told her I was awfully in love with you, and she made me promise not to write, but to see what my feelings were when I came back. And now I've come back, and I love you more than ever, because I love you in a different way. I was only a boy then, and now I am a man, and it is as a man that I love you, and that sweet golden head and your lovely golden face; and if my people behave properly, I shall get a ring, and put it on this little finger--" "You silly boy. That's my right hand," she laughed. "Then there will be only two more years to wait." "I shall be only a baby," sighed Boodles. "Darling, you will be as old as I am now; and I'm nineteen," said Aubrey, with all the dignity and assurance of such longevity. "Fancy such a child with an engagement-ring! It would be absurd!" said Boodles. "I shan't be well off, darling," he said, making the confession with a boy's usual awkwardness. "Then I won't have you," she declared. "I must have a boy with heaps of money, who will give me all the luxuries I have been used to. You know we live very expensively at Lewside. We have a joint of meat every week, and father has two eggs for breakfast, and I have two new frocks every year--I get the stuff and make them myself. If I had a hungry boy to keep, I should want a lot of housekeeping money, though I can make a penny do the work of three halfpence." "Dear Boodles!" "Does that 'dear' mean expensive? Well, I am. Some of the stuff for my frocks costs I don't know how much a yard, and it's no use trying to be pretty to a draper, for you can't smile them down a single penny." "You are very silly, darling. As if I should let you make your own frocks!" "You are much sillier. So silly that you are hardly fit to live. Telling me you won't be well off! I think if it was all over between us now I shouldn't care a bit."