'No. Only going to be married mother.'
'But a year's engagement is the least, the very least I could countenance,' she pleaded, 'and a year is so soon gone. One eats and sleeps, and Lord's Day breaks the week, and time soon passes.'
'Oh, can't you understand, mother?' He tried illustration. 'Suppose you saw a beautiful shawl out on a hedge in the rain, shouldn't you want to bring it in?'
'Certainly not. It would be most unwise. Besides, I have seven.'
'Well, anyway, I can't put it off. Even now something may have happened to her.'
He spoke with the sense of the inimical in life that all lovers feel.
'But things will have to be bought,' she said helplessly, 'and things will have to be made.'
'There is plenty of time, several weeks yet. Won't you,' he suggested tactfully, 'see after Hazel's clothes for her? She is too poor to buy them herself. Won't you lay out a sum of money for me mother?'
'Yes, I think,' she said, beginning to recover her benignity—'I think
I could lay out a sum of money.'
* * * * *