Gad! What a rotten look-out! What a rotten world to be sure! Fancy losing Lucille!… Should he put his fortunes to the touch, risk all, and propose to her. Fellows did these things in such circumstances…. No—hardly fair to try to catch her like that before she had had at least one season, and knew what was what and who was who…. Hardly the clean potato—to take advantage of their long intimacy and try to trap her while she was a country mouse. It was not as though he were clever and could hope for a great career and the power to offer her the position for which she was fitted. Why, he was nearly bottom of his year at Sandhurst—not a bit brilliant and brainy. Suppose she married him in her inexperience, and then met the right sort of intellectual, clever feller too late. No, it wouldn’t be the straight thing and decent at all, to propose to her now. How would Grumper view such a step? What had he to offer her? What was he? Just a penniless orphan. Apart from Grumper’s generosity he owned a single five-pound note in money. Never won a scholarship or exam-prize in his life. Mere Public Schools boxing and fencing champion, and best man-at-arms at Sandhurst, with a score or so of pots for running, jumping, sculling, swimming, shooting, boxing, fencing, steeple-chasing and so forth. His total patrimony encashed would barely pay for his Army outfit. But for Grumper’s kindness he couldn’t go into the Army at all. And Grumper, the splendid old chap, couldn’t last very much longer. Why—for many a long year he would not earn more than enough to pay his mess-bills and feed his horses. Not in England certainly…. Was he to ask Lucille to leave her luxurious home in a splendid mansion and live in a subaltern’s four-roomed hut in the plains in India? (Even if he could scrape into the Indian army so as to live on his pay—more or less.) Grumper, her guardian, and executor of the late Bishop’s will, might have very different views for her. Why, she might even be his heiress—he was very fond of her, the daughter of his lifelong friend and kinsman. Fancy a pauper making up to a very rich girl—if it came to her being that, which he devoutly hoped it would not. It would remove her so hopelessly beyond his reach. By the time he could make a position, and an income visible to the naked eye, he would be grey-haired. Money was not made in the army. Rather was it becoming no place for a poor gentleman but the paradise of rich bounders, brainy little squits of swotters, and commission-without-training nondescripts—thanks to the growing insecurity of things among the army class and gentry generally. If she were really penniless he might—as a Captain—ask her to share his poverty—but was it likely shed be a spinster ten years hence—even if he were a Captain so soon? Promotion is not violently rapid in the Cavalry…. And yet he simply hated the bare thought of life without Lucille. Better to be a gardener at Monksmead, and see her every day, than be the Colonel of a Cavalry