"If I had means to justify it I should speak to her," mused he--as he had told himself forty times over, and forty more. "But when a fellow has no fortune, and no prospect of fortune; when it may be seen by no end of odd signs and tokens that he has not so much as a silver coin in his pocket, how can he ask a girl the one great question of life? Old Paul would send me to the right-about." He leaned his head sideways for a few minutes against the trunk of a tree, gazing at the reddening sky through the green tracery of the waving boughs; and fell to musing again. "If she loved me as I love her, she would be glad to wait on as things are, hoping for better times. Lovers, who are truly attached to each other, do wait for years and years, and are all the happier for it. Sometimes I feel inclined to enlist in a crack regiment. The worst of it is that a fellow rarely rises from the ranks in England to position and honour, as he does in France; they manage things better over there. If old Uncle Edward would only open his purse-strings and buy me a commission, I might---- Halloa!" A burst of girlish laughter, and a pair of girlish arms, flung round his neck from behind, disturbed Oliver's castles-in-the-air. Jane came round and sat down beside him. "I thought I should find you here, Oliver," she said. "Frock finished, Janey?" "Finished! why no," she exclaimed. "It will hardly be finished by this time to-morrow." "Why, how idle you must have been!" "Idle? You don't understand things, or the time it takes to make an old frock into a new one. A dressmaker might have done it in a day, but I'm not a dressmaker, you know, Oliver." "Is it a silk gown?" "It is a mousseline-de-laine, if you chance to be acquainted with that material," answered Janey. "It was very pretty when it was new: pale pink and lilac blossoms upon a cream ground. But it has been washed, and that has made it shrink, and it has to be let out everywhere and lengthened, and the faded silk trimming has to be turned, and--oh, ever so much work. And now, I daresay you are as wise as you were before, Oliver." "I've heard of washed-out dresses," remarked Oliver. "They look like rags, don't they?" "Some may. Mine won't. It has washed like a pocket-handkerchief, and it looks as good as new." "Wish my coats would wash," said Oliver. "They are getting shabby, and I want some new ones." Not having any consolation to administer in regard to the coats, Jane did not take up the subject. "What have you been doing all day, Oliver?" she asked. "Airing my patience in that blessed Buttery," replied he. "Never stirred out of it at all, except for dinner." "I thought you wanted to get over to Islip this afternoon."