“Poor Duke!” said the tutor.
“Really and truly. And oh, Mr Armstrong, if you would only wait I would love to marry you some day! How soon shall I be big enough?”
This was getting embarrassing. But the tutor was in a tender mood, and had it not in his heart to thwart the little Leap-year maid. “Time flies fast,” said he; “you’ll be grown up before we know where we all are.”
She sighed.
“I know you’d sooner have Rosalind. But she doesn’t care for you as much as I do. She likes Roger best; but I don’t; I like you fifty thousand times better. Would it be an awful bother, Mr Armstrong?”
“What! to have Jill for my little wife?” said he. “Not a bit. If ever I want one, she’s the first person I mean to ask.”
With this declaration Jill had to rest content. It solaced her sorrow vastly; and even though Rosalind, to whom she confided the compact under a pledge of secrecy, scolded and laughed at her alternately, she felt a new prospect open before her, and set herself resolutely to the task of growing up worthy of Mr
Armstrong’s affection.
But amid all these troubles and hopes at Maxfield, two questions were on every one’s lips: “Where was Roger? Where was Robert Ratman?”
Roger had written once after reaching Paris, a letter full of hope, which had arrived a few days before Captain Oliphant’s death. He had succeeded at last in tracking the man Pantalzar to a low lodging in the city, and from him had ascertained somewhat of the history of the Callot family. They had lodged with him at Long Street in London, where they had given lessons in acting, elocution, and music; and Pantalzar clearly remembered the lad Rogers as a constant visitor at the house, partly in the capacity of a promising student of the dramatic art, and partly as a hopeless lover of his preceptor’s wayward daughter.