“I suppose you see no more of those people—­what’s their name—­ the Crosses?” he let fall, as if casually, one evening when Franks had come to see him.”

“Lost sight of them altogether,” was the reply.  “Why do you ask?”

“I happened to think of them,” said Will; and turned to another subject.

CHAPTER 23

Was he to be a grocer for the rest of his life?—­This question, which at first scarcely occurred to him, absorbed as he was in the problem of money-earning for immediate needs, at length began to press and worry.  Of course he had meant nothing of the kind; his imagination had seen in the shop a temporary expedient; he had not troubled to pursue the ultimate probabilities of the life that lay before him, but contented himself with the vague assurance of his hopeful temper.  Yet where was the way out?  To save money, to accumulate sufficient capital for his release, was an impossibility, at all events within any reasonable time.  And for what windfall could he look?  Sherwood’s ten thousand pounds hovered in his memory, but no more substantial than any fairy-tale.  No man living, it seemed to him, had less chance of being signally favoured by fortune.  He had donned his apron and aproned he must remain.

Suppose, then, he so far succeeded in his business as to make a little more than the household at St. Neots required; suppose it became practicable to—­well, say, to think of marriage, of course on the most modest basis; could he quite see himself offering to the girl he chose the hand and heart of a grocer?  He laughed.  It was well to laugh; merriment is the great digestive, and an unspeakable boon to the man capable of it in all but every situation; but what if she also laughed, and not in the sympathetic way?  Worse still, what if she could not laugh, but looked wretchedly embarrassed, confused, shamed?  That would be a crisis it needed some philosophy to contemplate.

For the present, common sense made it rigorously plain to him that the less he thought of these things, the better.  He had not a penny to spare.  Only by exercising an economy which in the old days would have appalled him, could he send his mother and sister an annual sum just sufficient to their needs.  He who scorned and loathed all kinds of parsimony had learnt to cut down his expenditure at every possible point.  He still smoked his pipe; he bought newspapers; he granted himself an excursion, of the cheapest, on fine Sundays; but these surely were necessities of life.  In food and clothing and the common expenses of a civilised man, he pinched remorselessly; there was no choice.  His lodgings cost him very little; but Mrs. Wick, whose profound suspiciousness was allied with unperfect honesty, now and then made paltry overcharges in her bill, and he was angry with himself for his want of courage to resist them.  It meant only a shilling or two, but retail trade