and I'll do things.'

'Artists always want money, don't they?'

'I've got a hundred and twenty pounds a year of my own. My guardians
tell me I'm to have it when I come of age. That will be enough to begin
with.'

'Ah, I'm rich,' said Maisie. 'I've got three hundred a year all my own
when I'm twenty-one. That's why Mrs. Jennett is kinder to me than she is
to you. I wish, though, that I had somebody that belonged to me,--just a
father or a mother.'

'You belong to me,' said Dick, 'for ever and ever.'

'Yes, we belong--for ever. It's very nice.' She squeezed his arm. The
kindly darkness hid them both, and, emboldened because he could only
just see the profile of Maisie's cheek with the long lashes veiling the
gray eyes, Dick at the front door delivered himself of the words he had
been boggling over for the last two hours.

'And I--love you, Maisie,' he said, in a whisper that seemed to him to
ring across the world,--the world that he would to-morrow or the next
day set out to conquer.

There was a scene, not, for the sake of discipline, to be reported, when
Mrs. Jennett would have fallen upon him, first for disgraceful
unpunctuality, and secondly for nearly killing himself with a forbidden
weapon.