“When?” Wilfrid burst out upon Arabella’s affectionate signature.  “When will he send it?  He doesn’t do me the honour to mention the time.  And this is his reply to a third application!”

The truth was that Wilfrid was in dire want of tangible cash simply to provision his yacht.  The light kindled in him by this unsatisfied need made him keen to comprehend all that Arabella’s attempt at plain writing designed to unfold.

“Good God, my father’s the woman’s trustee!” shaped itself in Wilfrid’s brain.

And next:  “If he marries her we may all be as poor as before.”  That is to say, “Honour may be saved without ruin being averted.”

His immediate pressing necessity struck like a pulse through all the chords of dismal conjecture.  His heart flying about for comfort, dropped at Emilia’s feet.

“Bella’s right,” he said, reverting to the green page in his hand; “we can’t involve others in our scrape, whatever it may be.”

He ceased on the spot to be at war with himself, as he had been for many a day; by which he was taught to imagine that he had achieved a mental indifference to misfortune.  This lightened his spirit considerably.  “So there’s an end of that,” he emphasized, as the resolve took form to tell Lady Charlotte flatly that his father was ruined, and that the son, therefore, renounced his particular hope and aspiration.

“She will say, in the most matter-of-fact way in the world, ’Oh, very well, that quite alters the case,’” said Wilfrid aloud, with the smallest infusion of bitterness.  Then he murmured, “Poor old governor!” and wondered whether Emilia would come to this place according to his desire.  Love, that had lain crushed in him for the few recent days, sprang up and gave him the thought, “She may be here now;” but, his eyes not being satiated instantly with a sight of her, the possibility of such happiness faded out.

“Blessed little woman!” he cried openly, ashamed to translate in tenderer terms the soft fresh blossom of love that his fancy conjured forth at the recollection of her.  He pictured to himself hopefully, moreover, that she would be shy when they met.  A contradictory vision of her eyes lifted hungry for his first words, or the pressure of his arm displeased him slightly.  It occurred to him that they would be characterized as a singular couple.  To combat this he drew around him all the mysteries of sentiment that had issued from her voice and her eyes.  She had made Earth lovely to him and heaven human.  She—­what a grief for ever that her origin should be what it was!  For this reason:—­lovers must live like ordinary people outwardly; and say, ye Fates, how had she been educated to direct a gentlemen’s household?

“I can’t exist on potatoes,” he pronounced humorously.

But when his thoughts began to dwell with fitting seriousness on the woman-of-the-world tone to be expected from Lady Charlotte, he folded the mental image of Emilia closely to his breast, and framed a misty idea of a little lighted cottage wherein she sat singing to herself while he was campaigning.  “Two or three fellows—­Lumley and Fredericks—­shall see her,” he thought.  The rest of his brother officers were not even to know that he was married.