“Then what are you going to do?” said Francis, who did not seem so much delighted with Jane’s good news as she had expected.  “Are you to live here with Peggy, as before?”

“Not just as before.  I am going to Mrs. Dunn’s through the day, and Peggy is good enough to say she will be glad to keep me, though I lose my better half in Jane.  I think I really have some taste and talent for millinery, and I mean to try to cultivate it; for if we begin business together in Melbourne, it may be very useful.  Jane and I lay awake half the night, talking over our plans, and I do not see why we should not make our way in time.”

“Then, you are going to forget the Muses altogether, and give your whole soul to business?”

“Did you not do that every day, cousin Francis, when you were at the Bank?” said Elsie.

“Perhaps you may write better poetry when you do not make it your day’s work.  Do you not think she may, Francis?” said Jane.

“Very probably—­very probably she may;” said Francis, thoughtfully, as if he were weighing the advantages of literature being a staff, over its being a crutch, but in reality he was not thinking of Elsie or her verses, at all.

He had prepared himself to make a great sacrifice—­to do something very generous and Quixotic—­not altogether uninfluenced by the wish for personal happiness of the highest kind; but yet he believed that his chief motives for taking the resolution were the forlorn and hopeless situation of the two girls.  Now they were no longer forlorn or hopeless.  If this situation for Jane was obtained, and Elsie persevered in her determination to work hard at the perfecting of her taste for making caps and bonnets, they had a definite plan of life, likely to be as prosperous as that he could offer to them.  And Jane would not accept of him to-day, though she would probably have done so yesterday.  His plans, his ambitions, were too dear to her to be thrown away lightly, and he could see nothing but sisterly affection in her eyes.  If she took the position she was entitled to at Mr. Phillips’s, she was likely to meet with some society there, and Mr. Brandon, or some other Australian settler, not so shy of matrimony without a fortune on the lady’s part, as the middle-class Englishman of this century is, might see some of the virtues and attractions which he had learned to love—­no one could see so many of them as himself—­and might win the best wife in the world, without being fully conscious of the blessing.  He knew the real strength of his love, when he tried to fancy Jane the wife of any one else.  He almost wished she might fail in her object, and that Mr. Phillips would decide that she would not suit.  He was selfish enough to hope that she might not be happy there.  They must continue to correspond as frequently and as openly as hitherto.  He would watch for any turn that might offer him hope, and he must be all the more careful to disguise his real feelings, lest it might prevent her from expressing herself as frankly as she had done.  When a blessing appears to be lost its value is greatly enhanced, and all the comforts, and privileges, and opportunities, of his present situation, that he had made such an effort to give up, seemed to shrink into insignificance, compared with the domestic happiness that was now eluding his grasp.