"Yes, and he sails next week, and the name of his ship is the _Queen of the South_, and he goes by Liverpool instead of Southampton, because it costs less; and he leaves St. Andrews on Monday morning." "Are you sure he said Monday morning?" For that was Saturday night. "Certain, because he has to get his outfit still. Oh, what fun it must be!" And the boys went on, greatly excited, and repeating everything Mr. Roy had told them--for he had made them fond of him, even in those few months--expatiating with delight on his future career, as a merchant or something, they did not quite know what; but no doubt it would be far nicer and more amusing than stopping at home and grinding forever on horrid books. Didn't Miss Williams think so? Miss Williams only smiled. She knew how all his life he had loved "those horrid books," preferring them to pleasure, recreation, almost to daily bread; how he had lived on the hope that one day he--born only a farmer's son--might do something, write something. "I also am of Arcadia." He might have done it or not--the genius may or may not have been there; but the ambition certainly was. Could he have thrown it all aside? And Why? Not for mere love of money; she knew him too well for that. He was a thorough book-worm, simple in all his tastes and habits--simple almost to penuriousness; but it was a penuriousness born of hard fortunes, and he never allowed it to affect any body but himself. Still, there was no doubt he did not care for money, or luxury, or worldly position--any of the things that lesser men count large enough to work and struggle and die for. To give up the pursuits he loved, deliberately to choose others, to change his whole life thus, and expatriate himself, as it were, for years--perhaps for always--why did he do it, or for whom? Was it for a woman? Was it for her? If ever, in those long empty days and wakeful nights, this last thought entered Fortune's mind, she stifled it as something which, once to have fully believed and then disbelieved would have killed her. That she should have done the like for him--that or any thing else involving any amount of heroism or self-sacrifice--well, it was natural, right; but that he should do it for her? That he should change his whole purpose of life that he might be able to marry quickly, to shelter in his bosom a poor girl who was not able to fight the world as a man could, the thing--not so very impossible, after all--seemed to her almost incredible! And yet (I am telling a mere love story, remember--a foolish, innocent love story, without apologizing for either the folly or the innocence) sometimes she was so far "left to herself," as the Scotch say, that she did believe it: in the still twilights, in the wakeful nights, in the one solitary half hour of intense relief, when, all her boys being safe in bed, she rushed out into the garden under the silent stars to sob, to moan, to speak out loud words which nobody could possibly hear.