"You have made up your mind, then, to marry for money?" He is watching her closely, and his brow has contracted a good deal, and his lips show some pain.
"I have made up my mind to nothing. Perhaps I haven't one to make up,"--lightly. "But I hate teaching, and I hate being poor. That is all. But we were not talking of that. We were thinking of Mr. Hastings. At all events, you must confess he reads well, and that is something! Almost everybody reads badly."
"They do," says Branscombe, meekly. "I do. Unless in words of one syllable, I can't read at all. So the curate has the pull over me there. Indeed, I begin to feel myself nowhere beside the curate. He can read well, and drink tea well, and I can't do either."
"Why, here we are at the vicarage," says Georgie, in a tone of distinct surprise, that is flattering to the last degree. "I didn't think we were half so close to it. I am so glad I met you, because, do you know, the walk hasn't seemed nearly so long as usual. Well, good-by."
"May I have those violets?" says Branscombe, pointing to a little bunch of those fair comers of the spring that lies upon her breast.
"You may," she says, detaching them from her gown and giving them to him willingly, kindly, but without a particle of the tender confusion he would gladly have seen in her. "They are rather faded," she says, with some disappointment; "you could have picked yourself a sweeter bunch on your way home."
"Well, good-by again," she says, turning up to him the most bewitching and delicious of small faces, "and be sure you put my poor flowers in water. They will live the longer for it."
"They shall live forever. A hundred years hence, were you to ask me where they were, I swear I should be able to show them."
"A very safe oath," says Miss Broughton; and then she gives him her hand, and parts from him, and runs all the way down the short avenue to the house, leaving him to turn and go on to Gowran.
"There have been hearts whose friendship gave Them thoughts at once both soft and grave."
In the drawing-room he finds Clarissa sitting among innumerable spring offerings. The whole place seems alive with them. "The breath of flowers is on the air." Primroses and violets shine out from tiny Etruscan vases, and little baskets of pale Belleek are hidden by clustering roses brought from the conservatory to make sweet the sitting-room of their mistress.
