"Edward! are you mad? Bushey—we don't live at Bushey."
Her husband smiled sarcastically.
"Don't we, my dear? really you surprise me—but we're going to, Charlotte, we're going to—for two nights only, as the play-bills say. We are going to borrow Adderbury Cottage. The firm owes me a bit, and I'll take it out in Adderbury Cottages."
Charlotte was fully roused now.
"Edward Povey, I'll not do it."
Her husband brought his fist down on the table with a thump that rattled the crockery and even infused a little flickering life into the surface of the glass of dull supper beer.
"You'll do as I say, Charlotte; I'm master here now, and new brooms sweep clean, you know. Now, put some more coals on, and go to bed."
With a strange sense of awe Mrs. Povey, for the first time in her married life, did as she was bid, and, with a look of wonderment on her vacant face, glided slowly from the room. For perhaps another hour Edward sat over the replenished fire elaborating his scheme. Really it was absurdly simple; of risk there was none. A kind fate had shown them a simple way out of their difficulties, and it would be criminal to ignore it. He knew Uncle Jasper far too well to think of admitting to him that he was a failure in the world. He knew, too, that the old man held him in some little contempt, and he welcomed this chance of showing him his mistake. As for Charlotte, she had evidently committed herself pretty deeply in her correspondence with Aunt Eliza, and Edward anticipated no sustained opposition from that quarter.
It was past midnight when Edward rose and opened the little fumed oak bureau that stood in the recess by the fire-place, and taking a sheet of the notepaper of Messrs. Kyser, Schultz & Company, wrote to Mr. Jasper Jarman telling him how glad Charlotte and himself were to hear that he proposed paying them a visit. He said that the firm for which he had the honour to work had at last awakened to the value of his services, and that a substantial increase of salary had given him the opportunity to receive his dear wife's uncle in a manner more fitted to his position, and that he remained with all good wishes, his uncle's most affectionate nephew, Edward Povey.
The little iron gate creaked again that night, and as Edward dropped the letter into the box at the corner of the terrace he told himself that his new life promised infinitely more possibilities than that to which he had been accustomed for the past fifteen years.