"I mean to study very hard, get up my shorthand, and to write as much as ever I can when I join the staff. But of course I shan't stay in Wheelton all my life. There's better papers than the _Guardian_, you know." "That's the true spirit, lad; always look ahead. If I hadn't been looking ahead all these years, where would the twenty-five pounds ha' come from, and the money that's to keep you for the next six months?" "I'm sure I don't know what could have been done without it. I don't think opportunities are as plentiful as we are told." Henry had learned a little since that day he rode to Stratford with the carrier. "Didn't think much of the office, though. Did you, 'Enry?" "No," he admitted somewhat unwillingly, "it wasn't so fine as I had expected; but perhaps it is as good as they need." "And nobody needs anythink better than that," which summed up in a sentence Edward John's philosophy of life and the secret of his financial soundness. The few days remaining to Henry in Stratford went past all too slowly, despite the jubilation of Mr. Trevor Smith at the success of his promising _protege_, and Henry's application to the study of shorthand, with which most of his time at the book-shop had been occupied of late. Mr. Griggs and Pemble he left without a pang, the former still concerned about his poultry, and the latter still cultivating his moustache; but he was sorry to say good-bye to Mrs. Filbert and the irrepressible Trevor, who would have made the success of his proposal an excuse to borrow a fourth half-crown, were it not that the memory of the unpaid three had better not be reawakened when Henry was going away. His journey to Wheelton found him with hopes scarcely so high as those he had cherished on his way to Stratford some three months before, but he was at least fortified with some measure of that common sense which only rises in the mind as the illusions of youth begin to sink. It was not thought necessary for him to revisit Hampton Bagot before removing to Wheelton--his face was still turned away from home. Thus far he had been marking time merely; but now he was on the march in earnest. CHAPTER VII AMONG NEW FRIENDS