She clapped her hands, like the child she was, and adjusted the ring.
“It is very pretty,” she said.
“It is very simple,” he answered lightly. “But,” he added, with a change of tone, “it is very durable. And that is the important thing. For I shall not be in a position to marry before I am forty.”
A shadow of disappointment hovered over Katie’s clear young brow, but was instantly chased away by the thought that to be engaged was almost as splendid as to be married.
“Recently,” said her lover, “I meditated leaving Oxford for Australia. But now that you have come into my life, I am compelled to drop that notion, and to carve out the career I had first set for myself. A year hence, if I get a Second in Greats—and I SHALL” he said, with a fierce look that entranced her—“I shall have a very good chance of an assistant-mastership in a good private school. In eighteen years, if I am careful—and, with you waiting for me, I SHALL be careful—my savings will enable me to start a small school of my own, and to take a wife. Even then it would be more prudent to wait another five years, no doubt. But there was always a streak of madness in the Noakses. I say ‘Prudence to the winds!’”
“Ah, don’t say that!” exclaimed Katie, laying a hand on his sleeve.
“You are right. Never hesitate to curb me. And,” he said, touching the ring, “an idea has just occurred to me. When the time comes, let this be the wedding-ring. Gold is gaudy—not at all the thing for a schoolmaster’s bride. It is a pity,” he muttered, examining her through his spectacles, “that your hair is so golden. A schoolmaster’s bride should—Good heavens! Those ear-rings! Where did you get THEM?”
“They were given to me to-day,” Katie faltered. “The Duke gave me them.”
“Indeed?”
“Please, sir, he gave me them as a memento.”