“That’s easy,” she answered.  “If your love for me was not strong enough to conquer your love for Nelly Bascombe, then I’m very much afraid, father, my love for you might go down in its turn, before my feelings for another man.  In a word, dad, if I felt I wasn’t the queen of your home no more, I should turn my attention to being queen of another.”

He stared at that.

“Never heard anything more interesting, dear child,” he said. “’Tis a wonderful picture to see you reigning away from Wych Elm.  But though I’m sure there’s a dozen men would thank their stars for such a wife as you, I can’t but feel in these hard times that few struggling bachelors would be equal even to such a rare woman, unless it was in her power to bring ’em something besides her fine self.”

She smiled at that and rather expected it.

“I thought you’d remind me how it stood and I was a pauper if you so willed,” she replied.  “But we needn’t go into figures, because the man I’m aiming at knows you very well, and he’ll quite understand that if he was to get me away from you, there won’t be no flags flying when I go to him, nor yet any marriage portion.  He ain’t what you might call a struggling bachelor, however, but a pretty snug man by general accounts.”

“And who might he be, I wonder?” asked John; because in his heart he didn’t believe for a moment there was any such a man in the world; and when Jane declined to name Martin Ball, her father was more than ever convinced that she was bluffing.

“We will suffer a month to pass, Jane,” he told her.  “Let a full month go by for us to see where we stand and get the situation clear in our minds.  Certain it is that nought that could happen will ever cloud my undying affection for you, and I well know I’m the light also to which your fine daughterly devotions turn.  So let this high matter be dead between us till four weeks have slipped by.”

“Like your sense to suggest it,” she answered.

And the subject weren’t named again between ’em till somebody else named it.

But meantime John didn’t hesitate to take the affair in strict secrecy to the woman who had promised to wed him; and when the engagement was known, of course, Martin Ball struck while the iron was hot and felt a great bound of hope that Jane would now look upon him with very different eyes.  And even while he hoped, his spirit sank a bit now and again in her company.  But he put the weak side away and told himself that love was at best a fleeting passion.

Jane didn’t say much to him herself, because in truth she would have a thousand times sooner bided at Wych Elm with her parent than wed the busy man of Little Silver; but Martin screwed himself to the pinch and urged her to let there be a double wedding.  He found her very evasive, however, for hope hadn’t died in Jane, and she knew by a good few signs her father was hating the thought of losing her.  The idea of Jane away from Wych Elm caused him a lot