"And you will come with me, Betty darling, come with me as my wife," he said joyously. "I wonder if you realise what you are doing in marrying me. It's rather like catching a lark and shutting it up in a close dark cage, for my work will lie in some slum parish probably, where sorrow and sin will close you in on every side, and after your free country-life out here, you will feel choked by it often and often."
"I daresay I shall, but—I shall have you," said Betty, simply. "Shall we go and tell mother?"
Mr. and Mrs. Treherne's consent was a foregone conclusion, and separation from their only daughter being as yet a thing in the distance, left them free now to rejoice in her happiness. Ted's congratulations when he came in from the farm were rather less hearty.
"It's rather a mean trick to play," he said. "You had all England to choose from, and you come out here and want to carry off our Betty, and there's not a girl who can hold a candle to her in all the colony, is there, mother?"
"Not one," said Mrs. Treherne, giving the hand she held a squeeze.
"And that's the very reason why I want to take her home when the time comes," said Tom with a happy laugh. "I want them to see the kind of girl the colony can produce. I don't underrate her, Ted."
"I won't stay and be discussed as if I wasn't here," said Betty, blushing a little. "Ought not we to go and see Clarissa, Tom?" so they walked off together down the paddock, hand-in-hand.
"And that's how they'll walk off one day for good and all," said Ted, watching them moodily from the verandah. "Hang it all, mother. I wonder you can take it so quietly. Why can't she marry some man in the colony, and stay in the land she belongs to? They will only look down upon her in England," but that fired Mrs. Treherne into speech.
"Look down on her! Look down on my Betty! Isn't it because I know that to Tom she is the one woman in all the world that I give my consent to his carrying her away? But don't rub it in, Ted," and her tone was a little weary. "She's not going yet for a year or two, and every mother has to face the fact that the young ones she has reared and loved will fly off sometime and make nests of their own. It's God's law, and there is no escaping it."
Ted bent and brushed his bronzed cheek against hers.