“It is not the trouble of yesterday. It is a trouble which lasts, which is going on, which may never come to an end. I don’t think you can say of any trouble that it is only of yesterday.” “That is very true; still, you and I are not given to philosophising, Winnie, and I thought there might be some new incident. I suppose he sails to-day?” “Yes, he sails to-day: and when will he come back again? Will he ever come back? The two of them? Oh, Edward, life is very hard, very different from what one thought.” “At your age people are seldom so much mixed up in it. But there is the good as well as the bad.” “Perhaps,” said the girl, faltering, “I am looking through spectacles, not rose-coloured, all the other way. I don’t see very much of the good.” He pressed her arm close to his side. “Am not I a little bit of good; is not our life all good if it were only once begun?” “But what if it never begins?” “Winnie!” he cried, startled, standing still and drawing her suddenly in front of him so that he could look into her face. “Oh, Edward, don’t add to my troubles; I don’t see how it is ever to begin. My father means to put me in Tom’s place, as he put Tom in George’s place, and already he has said”-- “What has he said?” “Perhaps it means nothing,” she went on after a pause; “I should have kept it to myself.” “Winnie, that is worse than anything he can have said. What he says I can bear, but not that you should keep anything to yourself.” “It was not much. It was a sort of a threat. He said the match that was good enough for Winnie might not be good enough for”-- “His heiress. He is right enough,” young Langton said. At this, Winifred, who had been anticipating in her own mind all that was involved, trembled as if it had never occurred to her before, and turned upon him with an air, and indeed with the most real sentiment of grieved surprise. “Right?” she said, with wonder and reproach in her voice. “A country doctor,” said the young man, “a fellow with nothing, is not a match for the heiress of Bedloe. He is right enough. We cannot contradict him. You ought to make an alliance like a princess with some one like yourself.” “I did not think,” said Winnie, raising her head with a flush of anger, “that you would have been the one to make it all worse.” He smiled upon her, still holding her closely by the arm. “Did you think I had not thought of that before now? Of course, from his point of view, and, of course, from all points of view except our own, Winnie”-- “I am glad you make that exception.” “It is very magnanimous of me to do so, and you will have to be all the more good to me. I am not blind, and I have seen it all coming, from the moment of Tom’s failure. Why was he so silly as to fail, when a hundred boobies get through every year?” “Poor Tom!” she said, with a little gush of tears.