We anticipate; but we have, indeed, seen almost the last of Mr. Bunker. It is sad to part with him. But we have no choice.
In the evening Harry went as usual to the drawing-room. He stayed, however, after the girls went away. There was nothing unusual in his doing so. "Girls in my position," said the dressmaker, "are not tied by the ordinary rules." To-night, however, he had something to say.
"Congratulate me," he cried, as soon as they were alone. "I have turned out, as the story-books say, to be the heir to vast sums of money."
Angela turned pale. She was reassured, however, on learning the extent of the heritage.
"Consider my romantic story," said Harry. "Instead of finding myself the long-lost heir, strawberry-mark and all, to an earldom, I am the son of a sergeant in the Line. And then, just as I am getting over the blow, I find myself the owner of three houses and two thousand pounds. What workman ever had two thousand pounds before? There was an under-gardener I knew," he went on meditatively, "who once got a hundred; he called it a round hundred, I remember. He and his wife went on the hospitable drink for a fortnight; then they went to hospital for a month with trimmings; and then went back to work—the money all gone—and joined the Primitive Methodists. Can't we do something superior in the shape of a burst or a boom, for the girls, with two thousand pounds?"
"Tell me," said Angela, "how you got it."
He narrated the whole story, for her instruction and amusement, with some dramatic force, impersonating Bunker's wrath, terror, and entreaties, and final business-like collapse.
"So that," said Angela, "you are now a man of property, and will, I suppose, give up the work at the brewery."
"Do you think I should?"
"I do not like to see any man idle, and"—she hesitated—"especially you."