"I am saving my money for my future wife, Greta. I shall spend it on a nice house for her, and make her happy and comfortable for the rest of her life."
"Where is she?"
"I don't quite know. Somewhere in the world, I suppose; but I haven't met her yet."
They chatted on, and Greta went home that night with fresh thoughts and ideas circulating through her busy brain.
"That dragon is training her to be a cold-blooded prig!" was Rufus's mental ejaculation. "And yet how pretty the little mite looks as she repeats her nurse's denunciations!"
As spring came, and following it the summer, many were the expeditions that Rufus made with his little friend; and his happy, light-hearted buoyancy infected the old-fashioned little maiden to such a degree that her mother hardly knew her sometimes when her merry laugh rang through the house.
"I think," Rufus said to Greta one Saturday afternoon as he lay in the depths of a bluebell wood and watched her careering round the bushes after a butterfly, "that we have mutually benefited and improved each other by our 'unequal friendship,' as Becca terms it. I have made you younger, and you have made me older. There was room for improvement in both of us!"
Greta stopped her play and regarded him seriously.
"I don't quite understand you; but Becca says I'm getting a romp."
"And I am becoming a prig," responded Rufus, a laughing light in his dark eyes as he spoke; "but your wise speeches are making me think. Imagine my musings in such a heavenly scene as this, to be upon life, and how to use it without wasting it! Come along, we will have a game of hide-and-seek!"