A secret hope came to her. It was early days yet. Perhaps something would happen to her bye-and-bye, which, being over and done with, would leave her free to marry Alick with a clean heart and conscience.
To help it to come to pass, she stayed indoors, took no exercise, and ate as little as possible. Her health declined, and her face in the glass began to look peaky. She took a fierce joy in these signs of increasing weakness. The Miss Browns kept a few chickens in their back garden, and one morning, after the snow had begun to fall, they found Bessie in bare feet going out to feed them.
"Bessie, what are you doing?" they cried.
"It's nothing," she said. "I'm used of it, you know. I was eight years old before I wore shoe or stocking."
Meantime she was putting Gell off and off. "Time enough yet, boy," she would say as often as he asked her.
"She's thinking of me again," thought Gell, and he began on a long series of fictions to account for his new-found prosperity. He was getting along wonderfully in his profession, and was better off now than he had been before he lost his allowance. But still it was "Bye-and-bye! Time enough yet, boy!"
One day Gell came with an almost irresistible story. He had bespoken a house in Athol Street. It was just what they wanted. Close to the Law Library and nearly opposite the new Court House. Two rooms on the ground floor for his offices, two on the first floor for their living apartments, and two on the top for the kitchen and for the maid.
It is the temptation that no woman can resist—the desire to have a home that shall be all her own—and for a few weeks Bessie fell to it. Evening after evening, she and Alick sat side by side in the sitting-room making catalogues of all they would require to set up a household. Gell took charge of the tables and chairs and side-boards. Bessie was the authority on the blankets and linen. It was such a delight to construct a home from memory! And then what laughs and thrills and shamefaced looks when, in spite of all their thinking, they remembered some intimate and essential thing which they had hitherto forgotten.
"Sakes alive, boy, you've forgotten the bedstead."
"Lord, so I have. We shall want a bedstead, shan't we?"