“A partnership! Nothing definite, nothing to bind, and not yet, but in the future. It was but a hint. But think of it, mother! It is what I have been aiming at all along, but I didn’t expect to hear of it yet. Not one or two hundred a year, but say, five hundred to begin with, and three, four, five thousand by and by! Five thousand!” His eyes sparkled and he threw back the hair from his forehead with a characteristic gesture. “Five thousand a year! Think of that and don’t talk to me of Orders. Take Orders! Be a beggarly parson while I have that in my power, and in my power while I am still young! For trust me, with Ovington at the helm and the tide at flood we shall move. We shall move, mother! The money is there, lying there, lying everywhere to be picked up. And we shall pick it up.” “You take my breath away!” his mother protested, her faded, delicate face unusually flushed. “Five thousand a year! Gracious me! Why, it is more than your uncle has!” She raised her mittened hands in protest. “Oh, it is impossible!” The vision overcame her. But “It is perfectly possible,” he repeated. “Clement is of no use. He is for ever wanting to be out of doors—a farmer spoiled. Rodd’s a mere mechanic. Ovington cannot do it all, and he sees it. He must have someone he can trust. And then it is not only that I suit him. I am what he is not—a gentleman.” “If you could have it without going to the bank!” Mrs. Bourdillon said. And she sighed, golden as was the vision. But before they parted his eloquence had almost persuaded her. She had heard such things, had listened to such hopes, had been dazzled by such sums that she was well-nigh reconciled even to that which the old Squire dubbed “the trade of usury.” CHAPTER III Meanwhile Clement Ovington jogged homeward through the darkness, his thoughts divided between the discussion at which he had made an unwilling third, and the objects about him which were never without interest for this young man. He had an ear, and a very sharp one, for the piping of the pee-wits in the low land by the river, and the owl’s cadenced cry in the trees about Garth. He marked the stars shining in a depth of heaven opened amid the flying wrack of clouds; he picked out Jupiter sailing with supreme dominion, and the Dog-star travelling across the southern tract. His eye caught the gleam of water on a meadow, and he reflected that old Gregory would never do any good with that ground until he made some stone drains in it. Not a sound in the sleeping woods, not the barking of a dog at a lonely homestead—and he knew every farm by name and sight and quality—escaped him; nor the shape of a covert, blurred though it was and leafless. But amid all these interests, and more than once, his thoughts as he rode turned inwards, and he pictured the face of the girl at the ball. Long forgotten, it recurred to him with strange persistence.