"I think you are an abandoned little wretch," Bobby said, and dismissed the subject. It was so very evident that the curate as a rival for Prudence's favour was a negligible quantity. "Pretty tame, these old tabby meetings," Bobby remarked presently. "Why don't they do something in this benighted hole?" "That's what I am always wondering. I am looking to you to come home and wake the place up." "Paint it red?" he suggested, grinning. "Paint it any colour, save the drab hues which at present disfigure it. There isn't any earthly reason why people should remain satisfied to be so dull. What are you going to do when you come home to settle?" "Well, the first thing I shall do will be to marry--in order to get away from the Court," he replied with decision. "I refuse to be aunt-pecked any longer than necessity demands." "Does that include me?" Prudence inquired with irony. "You! Oh Lord!" He threw back his head and laughed. "You can come along and share my emancipation." "Thank you." Prudence's small chin was elevated, her lip curled disdainfully. "I shall contrive my own emancipation," she said. "How?" he asked, suddenly interested. "By marriage also," she answered, and laughed and broke from his detaining hand and fled indoors. Bobby looked after her in perplexity. "By Jove! I had forgotten that chap," he reflected, and recalled her earlier confidences with suddenly awakened suspicion and a mind not a little disturbed. He had been joking. Possibly Prudence had been joking also. But Wortheton without her would be a drear hole, he decided; and Wortheton and the factory were his ultimate and inevitable lot. And yet he did not wish her to remain unmarried. His five spinster aunts and the unmarried women he had met that afternoon, hovering hungrily about the little curate, sickened him. Prudence had no place in that gallery. She was altogether too fine and too clever to be wasted in the narrow seclusion of this life which she led with such evident distaste. Of course she would marry and go away. That was the chief point; she would go away. It didn't after all seem to matter who the fellow was, so long as he was a decent sort of chap and could provide for her an appreciate her qualities of beauty and intellect. If he didn't appreciate her--so Bobby philosophised--it would be a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire; but whoever it was got into the flames, the young man felt comfortably assured it would not be Prudence. She would contrive her emancipation more thoroughly than that. "I wish I had asked her more about that fellow," he mused. But he recognised that the time for asking questions was past. CHAPTER TEN.