"I thought my mother looked thin and weary. The girls were wonderfully well—great hearty, overgrown creatures! I felt myself a wretched little shrimp among them. As for happiness—well, they are as happy as people can expect to be who are very poor!"
"Do you really think poverty is incompatible with happiness?" asked the Major, with a philosophical air; "I have had a particularly happy life, and I have never been rich."
"Ah, that makes all the difference!" exclaimed Jessie. "You have never been rich, but they have always been poor. You can't conceive what a gulf lies between those two positions. You have been obliged to deny yourself a great many of the mere idle luxuries of life, I dare say—hunters, the latest improvements in guns, valuable dogs, continental travelling; but you have had enough for all the needful things—for neatness, cleanliness, an orderly household; a well-kept flower-garden, everything spotless and bright about you; no slipshod maid-of-all-work printing her greasy thumb upon your dishes—nothing out at elbows. Your house is small, but of its kind it is perfection; and your garden—well, if I had such a garden in such a situation I would not envy Eve the Eden she lost."
"Is that really your opinion?" cried the enraptured soldier; "or are you saying this just to please me—to reconcile me to my jog-trot life, my modest surroundings?"
"I mean every word I say."
"Then it is in your power to make me richer in happiness than Rothschild or Baring. Dearest Miss Bridgeman, dearest Jessie, I think you must know how devotedly I love you! Till to-day I have not dared to speak, for my limited means would not have allowed me to maintain a wife as the woman I love ought to be maintained; but this morning's post brought me the news of the death of an old Admiral of the Blue, who was my father's first cousin. He was a bachelor like myself—left the Navy soon after the signing of Sir Henry Pottinger's treaty at Nankin in '42—never considered himself well enough off to marry, but lived in a lodging at Devonport, and hoarded and hoarded and hoarded for the mere abstract pleasure of accumulating his surplus income; and the result of his hoarding—combined with a little dodging of his investments in stocks and shares—is, that he leaves me a solid four hundred a year in Great Westerns. It is not much from some people's point of view, but, added to my existing income, it makes me very comfortable. I could afford to indulge all your simple wishes, my dearest! I could afford to help your family!"
He took her hand. She did not draw it away, but pressed his gently, with the grasp of friendship.
"Don't say one word more—you are too good—you are the best and kindest man I have ever known!" she said, "and I shall love and honour you all my life; but I shall never marry! I made up my mind about that, oh! ever so long ago. Indeed, I never expected to be asked, if the truth must be told."
"I understand," said the Major, terribly dashed. "I am too old. Don't suppose that I have not thought about that. I have. But I fancied the difficulty might be got over. You are so different from the common run of girls—so staid, so sensible, of such a contented disposition. But I was a fool to suppose that any girl of——"
"Seven-and-twenty," interrupted Jessie; "it is a long way up the hill of girlhood. I shall soon be going down on the other side."