“You ought to be of yourself,” I said, “for taking my heart by storm in that fashion.” “Go along!” she cried, with a jerk of her elbow. “None of your gammon! I’m not to be caught by chaff.” “It wasn’t chaff, Dolly, though I may be a man of straw. Is that what you meant?” “You’re pretty free, upon my word. Who told you you might call me by my name?” “Why, you wouldn’t have me call you by any one else’s? It’s pretty enough, even for you.” “Oh, go away with you!” she cried. “I won’t listen.” At that moment Duke put his head in at the door. “The governor’s calling for you,” he said. “Hurry up.” “Well, they’re ready,” said the girl--“here,” and she thrust the packet into my hands, with a little blushing half-impudent look at me. I forgot all about her in a few minutes. My heart was too full of one only other girlish figure to find room in itself for a rival. What was Zyp doing now?--the wonderful fairy child, whose phantom presence haunted all my dreams for good and evil. As I walked from the office with Duke Straw that afternoon--for, as it was Saturday, we left early--a silence fell between us till we neared Cringle’s shop. Then, standing outside, he suddenly stayed me and looked in my face. “Shall I hate or love you?” he said, with his mouth set grimly. He made a gesture toward his deformed lower limbs with his hands, and shrugged his shoulders. “No,” he said; “what must be, must. I’ll love you!” There was a curious, defiant sadness in his tone, but it was gone directly. I could only stare at him in wonder. “You’re to be my house-fellow and chum,” he said. “No, don’t protest; I’ve settled it. We’ll arrange the rest with Cringle.” And so I slept in a bed in London for the first time. But the noise of a water wheel roared in my ears all night. CHAPTER XV. SWEET, POOR DOLLY. “Trender,” said Duke, unexpectedly after a silence the next morning, as we loitered over breakfast, “pay attention to one thing. I don’t ask you for a fragment of your past history and don’t want to hear anything about it. You’ll say, as yet you haven’t offered me your confidence, and quite right, too, on the top of our short acquaintance. But don’t ever offer it to me, you understand? Our friendship starts from sunrise, morning by morning, and lasts the day. I don’t mean it shall be the less true for that; I have a theory, that’s all.” “What is it, Straw?” “Sufficient for the day, it’s called. Providence has elected to give us, not one existence, but so many or few, each linked to the next by an insensibility and intercalated as a whole between appropriate limits.” “I don’t quite understand.” “Wait a bit. Each of these existences has its birth and death, and should be judged apart from the others; each is pronounced upon in succession by one’s familiar spirit and its minutes pigeon-holed and docketed above there. When the chain of evidence, for or against, is complete, up these links are gathered in a heap and weighed in both sides of the balance.”