poor bargain for you, a most miserable bargain.  You have still time.  Count the cost, and if it be too great, then draw back even now without fear of one word or inmost thought of reproach from me.  Your whole life is at stake.  How can I hold you to a decision which was taken before you realised what it meant?  Now I shall place the facts before you, and then, come what may, my conscience will be at rest, and I shall be sure that you are acting with your eyes open.

You have to compare your life as it is, and as it will be.  Your father is rich, or at least comfortably off, and you have been accustomed all your life to have whatever you desired.  From what I know of your mother’s kindness, I should imagine that no wish of yours has ever remained ungratified.  You have lived well, dressed well, a sweet home, a lovely garden, your collie, your canary, your maid.  Above all, you have never had anxiety, never had to worry about the morrow.  I can see all your past life so well.  In the mornings, your music, your singing, your gardening, your reading.  In the afternoons, your social duties, the visit and the visitor.  In the evening, tennis, a walk, music again, your father’s return from the City, the happy family-circle, with occasionally the dinner, the dance, and the theatre.  And so smoothly on, month after month, and year after year, your own sweet, kindly, joyous nature, and your bright face, making every one round you happy, and so reacting upon your own happiness.  Why should you bother about money?  That was your father’s business.  Why should you trouble about housekeeping?  That was your mother’s duty.  You lived like the birds and the flowers, and had no need to take heed for the future.  Everything which life could offer was yours.

And now you must turn to what is in store for you, if you are still content to face the future with me.  Position I have none to offer.  What is the exact position of the wife of the assistant-accountant of the Co-operative Insurance Office?  It is indefinable.  What are my prospects?  I may become head-accountant.  If Dinton died—­and I hope he won’t, for he is an excellent fellow—­I should probably get his berth.  Beyond that I have no career.  I have some aspirations after literature—­a few critical articles in the monthlies—­but I don’t suppose they will ever lead to anything of consequence.

And my income, 400 pounds a year with a commission on business I introduce.  But that amounts to hardly anything.  You have 50 pounds.  Our total, then, is certainly under 500 pounds.  Have you considered what it will mean to leave that charming house at St. Albans—­the breakfast-room, the billiard-room, the lawn—­and to live in the little 50 pounds a year house at Woking, with its two sitting-rooms and pokey garden?  Have I a right to ask you to do such a thing?  And then the housekeeping, the planning, the arranging, the curtailing, the keeping up appearances upon a