"Are you earning your living?" she asked. "Yes; I am managing it first-rate, and saving a little as I go along. You don't know what a screw I have become." "Who are you saving it for? Your mother?" Rufus smiled a little bitterly. "My mother is very comfortable. She wants nothing that I can give her." "Are you saving it for God?" Rufus looked startled; then he laughed. "You're the funniest little mortal I have ever come across! For whom should I save money if not for myself? Haven't I the best right to it? Isn't it mine for good and all? I am my own master, and I intend to be. My life is what I shall choose to make it. I am not going to rust in this country town for long; it is only the first step in the ladder. You wait till I am a rich man, Greta, and then you will know the worth of my savings!" "I thought people who saved money for themselves were called misers," said Greta, with a puzzled look; "and Becca says we live for other people, not ourselves!" "Hang Rebecca!" Rufus's tone was irritable; then seeing he had frightened the child, he went on— "I am saving my money for my future wife, Greta. I shall spend it on a nice house for her, and make her happy and comfortable for the rest of her life." "Where is she?" "I don't quite know. Somewhere in the world, I suppose; but I haven't met her yet." They chatted on, and Greta went home that night with fresh thoughts and ideas circulating through her busy brain. "That dragon is training her to be a cold-blooded prig!" was Rufus's mental ejaculation. "And yet how pretty the little mite looks as she repeats her nurse's denunciations!" As spring came, and following it the summer, many were the expeditions that Rufus made with his little friend; and his happy, light-hearted buoyancy infected the old-fashioned little maiden to such a degree that her mother hardly knew her sometimes when her merry laugh rang through the house. "I think," Rufus said to Greta one Saturday afternoon as he lay in the depths of a bluebell wood and watched her careering round the bushes after a butterfly, "that we have mutually benefited and improved each other by our 'unequal friendship,' as Becca terms it. I have made you younger, and you have made me older. There was room for improvement in both of us!" Greta stopped her play and regarded him seriously. "I don't quite understand you; but Becca says I'm getting a romp." "And I am becoming a prig," responded Rufus, a laughing light in his dark eyes as he spoke; "but your wise speeches are making me think. Imagine my musings in such a heavenly scene as this, to be upon life, and how to use it without wasting it! Come along, we will have a game of hide-and-seek!" There were times when, as he said, the little, old-fashioned maiden startled him by her earnest views of life; and though her remarks were often only repetitions of Becca's theories, they were none the less sapient and convincing. CHAPTER III HIS STORY INTERRUPTED