"'When poverty enters the door, love flies out of the window:' we had better make up our minds to wait, Bessie. I can better work in single than double harness just now." That was what he said to her, and Bessie waited,--not till she grew thin, but stout, and the spirit of her youth was gone; and it was a sober, middle-aged woman who took possession of the long-expected home.
Mrs. Mayne loved her husband, but during that tedious engagement her ardor had a little cooled, and it may be doubted whether the younger Richard was not dearer to her than his father; which was ungrateful, to say the least of it, as Mr. Mayne doted on his comely wife, and thought Bessie as handsome now as in the days when she came out smiling to welcome him, a slim young creature with youthful roses in her cheeks.
From this brief conversation it may be seen that none of the elders quite approved of this budding affection. Mrs. Challoner, who belonged to a good old family, found it hard to forgive the Maynes' lowliness of birth; and though she liked Dick, she thought Nan could do better for herself. Mr. Mayne pooh-poohed the whole thing so entirely that the women could only speak of it among themselves.
"Dick is a clever fellow; he ought to marry money," he would say. "I am not a millionaire, and a little more would be acceptable;" and though he was always kind to Nan and her sisters, he was forever dealing sly hits at her. "Phillis has the brains of the family," he would say: "that is the girl for my money. I call her a vast deal better looking than Nan, though people make such a fuss about the other one;" a speech he was never tired of repeating in his son's presence, and at which Dick snapped his fingers metaphorically and said nothing.
When Dick wished that one of them were going to Switzerland, Nan sighed furtively. Dick was going away for three months, for the remainder of the long vacation. After next week they would not see him until Christmas,--nearly six months. A sense of dreariness, as new as it was strange, swept momentarily over Nan as she pondered this. The summer months would be grievously clouded. Dick had been the moving spirit of all the fun; the tennis-parties, the pleasant dawdling afternoons, would lose their zest when he was away.