"Yes: with a house of my own--and, something else. I'm not afraid. I have begun to put my shoulder to the wheel in earnest. If I don't get on, it shall not be from lack of working for it." "How have you begun to put your shoulder to the wheel?" "Well--I take home copying to do in my spare time after office hours. I have been doing it in earnest over three weeks now." "And how much do you earn at it weekly?" continued William Yorke. A slight depression from its bright exultation passed over Roland's ingenuous face. Hamish saw it, and laughed. Hamish was quite a confidant, for Roland carried to him all his hopes and their tiresome drawbacks. "I can tell you: I added it up," said Roland. "Taking the three weeks on the average, it has been two-and-twopence a week." "Two-and-twopence a week!" echoed William Yorke, who had expected him (after the laudatory introduction) to say at least two pounds two. Roland detected the surprise and disappointment. "Oh, well, you know, William Yorke, a fellow cannot expect to make pounds just at first. What with mistakes, when the writing has to be begun all over again, and the paying for spoilt paper, which Brown insists upon, two-and-twopence is not so much amiss. One has to make a beginning at everything." "Are you a good hand at accounts?" enquired Mr. Yorke, possibly in the vague notion that Roland's talents might be turned to something more profitable than the copying of folios. "I ought to be," said Roland. "If the counting up, over and over and over again, of those frying-pans I carried to Port Natal, could have made a man an accountant, it must have made one of me. I used to be at it morning and evening. You see, I thought they were going to sell for about eight-and-twenty shillings apiece, out there: no wonder I often reckoned them up." "And they did not!" "Law, bless you! In the first place nobody wanted frying-pans, and I had to get a Natal store-keeper to house them in his place for me--I couldn't leave them on the quay. But the time came that I was obliged to sell them: they were eating their handles off." "With rust, I suppose." "Good gracious, no! with _rent_, not rust. The fellow (they are regular thieves, over there) charged me an awful rent: so I told him to put them into an auction. Instead of the eight-and-twenty shillings each that I had expected to get, he paid me about eight-and-twenty pence for the lot, case and all. But if you ask whether I am a ready reckoner, William Yorke, I'm sure I must be that." The Rev. William Yorke privately thought there might be a doubt upon the point. He fancied Roland's present prospects could not be first-rate. "The copying is nothing but a temporary preliminary," observed Roland. "I am waiting to get a place under Government. Vincent Yorke I expect can put me up for one, now he has come into power; and I don't think he'll want the will, though he did pass me over today."