"I'm not going to marry yet; not for ever so long. I'm going to learn dressmaking."
"But you'll promise you won't marry anybody else? I'll wait, as long as ever you wish, if only you'll be mine some day. Won't you? Nothing in the world would make me so happy. And I know what mother would say too."
Once again he had to say, "Won't you?"
And then at length, Jessie answered with a "Yes." At the moment she quite forgot a certain past declaration to the contrary. She only felt strangely happy. Jack's heart was true, after all her fears, and she no longer needed to hide her love for him.
But what would Miss Perkins say? That question came up, when a joyous ten minutes had gone by. Jack was for taking the bull by the horns at once. He was ready to do anything for anybody, if only he might have Jessie. His honest face beamed with delight, and he insisted on walking home there and then with Jessie, that he might at once ask Miss Perkins' consent.
When the matter was laid before her, Jessie blushing and Jack glowing, she made, wonderful to say, no objection. Miss Perkins had certainly grown softer of late—perhaps under Mildred's influence; and she no longer indulged her old dislike of the Groates family as a whole, while she had been heard to speak approvingly of Jack.
"But I'm not going to have any 'marrying in haste and repenting at leisure,'" she said with severity. "You're both of you full young; and you've got to make your way, Jack; and Jessie has got to make hers. She's taken to dressmaking, and I mean her to stick to it. By-and-by, when she has laid by something, and when you've laid by something too, and when you're both a few years older, it'll be time enough. I don't mind her seeing you sometimes, of course—so long as Jessie's a dutiful girl, and does what she's told. She's a deal improved lately, and I don't mind saying it neither."
Jack was glad to hear anything said in praise of Jessie, though, under the circumstances, he naturally did not imagine any improvement to be possible. "She's all I want her to be," he said ardently. Other people, perhaps, took a fairer view of the matter.
And so Jessie and Jack were engaged to be married.
"As I always said they would be, sister," declared Miss Sophy Coxen, who never could allow that she had made a mistake.