His good fortune! As he sat upon his wretched bed in his tiny lodging, luxurious words rang in his ears. "And the chance of achieving fame and fortune, keep that in the foreground!" Fame and fortune! And he had been overjoyed because he had obtained a chance of earning a few shillings as a bookseller's hack, a chance for which he was indebted to a handicraftsman. But a poor first step towards fame and fortune, Marian would think! He understood how utter had been her inexperience and his own; he had learned the wide distance between the fulfilment of such hopes as theirs, and the best of the bare possibilities which the future held for them, and the pain which this knowledge brought him, more for the sake of his own share in it, was doubly keen for hers. It was very hard for Walter Joyce to have to suffer the terrible disappointment and disenchantment of experience; but it was far harder for him to have to cause her to share them. Marian would indeed think it a "poor first step." He little knew how much more decisive a one she was about to take herself. CHAPTER VIII. FLITTING. Marian Ashurst dearly loved her home. To her concentrative and self-contained nature local associations were peculiarly precious; the place in which she had lived the life so essentially her own was very dear. The shabby old house, though she perfectly understood its shabbiness, and would have prized the power of renovating and adorning it as thoroughly as any _petite maîtresse_ would have prized the power of adorning her _bijou_ residence with all the prettiness of modern upholstery, was a shrine in her eyes. Base and unbeautiful, but sacred, the place in which her father had dutifully and patiently passed his laborious life--had it not been wasted? the proud discontented spirit asked itself many a time, but found no voice to answer "no."