If Lily’s prayers were interrupted by her new sorrow, I think that her fault in that respect would be forgiven.  Of course she had known that Crosbie was not going to remain at Allington much longer.  She knew quite as well as he did the exact day on which his leave of absence came to its end, and the hour at which it behoved him to walk into his room at the General Committee Office.  She had taught herself to think that he would remain with them up to the end of his vacation, and now she felt as a schoolboy would feel who was told suddenly, a day or two before the time, that the last week of his holidays was to be taken from him.  The grievance would have been slight had she known it from the first; but what schoolboy could stand such a shock, when the loss amounted to two-thirds of his remaining wealth?  Lily did not blame her lover.  She did not even think that he ought to stay.  She would not allow herself to suppose that he could propose anything that was unkind.  But she felt her loss, and more than once, as she knelt at her prayers, she wiped a hidden tear from her eyes.

Crosbie also was thinking of his departure more than he should have done during Mr Boyce’s sermon.  “It’s easy listening to him,” Mrs Hearn used to say of her husband’s successor.  “It don’t give one much trouble following him into his arguments.”  Mr Crosbie perhaps found the difficulty greater than did Mrs Hearn, and would have devoted his mind more perfectly to the discourse had the argument been deeper.  It is very hard, that necessity of listening to a man who says nothing.  On this occasion Crosbie ignored the necessity altogether, and gave up his mind to the consideration of what it might be expedient that he should say to Lily before he went.  He remembered well those few words which he had spoken in the first ardour of his love, pleading that an early day might be fixed for their marriage.  And he remembered, also, how prettily Lily had yielded to him.  “Only do not let it be too soon,” she had said.  Now he must unsay what he had then said; he must plead against his own pleadings, and explain to her that he desired to postpone the marriage rather than to hasten it,—­a task which, I presume, must always be an unpleasant one for any man engaged to be married.  “I might as well do it at once,” he said to himself, as he bobbed his head forward into his hands by way of returning thanks for the termination of Mr Boyce’s sermon.

As he had only three days left, it was certainly as well that he should do this at once.  Seeing that Lily had no fortune, she could not in justice complain of a prolonged engagement.  That was the argument which he used in his own mind.  But he as often told himself that she would have very great ground of complaint if she were left for a day unnecessarily in doubt as to this matter.  Why had he rashly spoken those hasty words to her in his love, betraying himself into all manner of scrapes, as a schoolboy might do, or such a one as Johnny Eames?  What