Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/43

 offering to defer his arrival at the schoolhouse until our own time. Of course that is impossible, and we go into Mr. Swainson's lodgings at once."

"My dearest Marian, my own pet, I hate to think of you in lodgings; I cannot bear to picture you so!"

"You must make haste and get your position, and take me to share it, then, Walter!" said the girl, with a half melancholy smile; "you must do great things, Walter. Dear papa always said you would, and you must prove how right he was!"

"Dearest, your poor father calculated on my success at college for the furtherance of my fortune, and now all that chance is over! Whatever I do now must be"

"By the aid of your own talent and industry, exactly the same appliances which you had to rely on if you had gone to the university, Walter. You don't fear the result? you're not alarmed and desponding at the turn which affairs have taken? It's impossible you can fail to attain distinction, and—and money and—and position, Walter— you must, don't you feel it?—you must!"

"Yes, dear, I feel it; I hope—I think! perhaps not so strongly, so enthusiastically as you do. You see,—don't be downcast, Marian, but it's best to look these things in the face, darling!—all I can try to get is a tutor's, or an usher's, or a secretary's place, and in any of these the want of the university stamp is heavily against me. There's no disguising that, Marian!"

"Oh, indeed; is that so?"

"Yes, child, undoubtedly. The university degree is like the hall mark in silver, and I'm afraid I shall find very few persons willing to accept me as the genuine article without it."

"And all this risk might have been avoided if your father had only"

"Well, yes; but then, Marian darling, if my father had left me money to go to college immediately on his death I should never have known you—known you, I mean, as you are, the dearest and sweetest of women."

He drew her to him as he spoke and pressed his lips on her forehead. She received the kiss without any undue emotion, and said:

"Perhaps that had been for the best, Walter."

"Marian, that's rank blasphemy. Fancy my hearing that, especially, too, on the night of my parting with you! No, my darling, all I want you to have is hope, hope and courage, and not too much ambition, dearest. Mine has been comparatively but a lotus-eating existence hitherto; to-morrow I begin the battle of life."

"But slightly armed for the conflict, my poor Walter!"

"I don't allow that, Marian. Youth, health, and energy are not bad weapons to have on one's side, and with your lore in the background"

"And the chance of achieving fame and fortune for yourself—keep that in the foreground!"

"That is to me, in every way, less than the other, but it is of course an additional spur. And now"

And then? When two lovers are on the eve of parting, their conversation is scarcely very interesting to any one else. Marian and Walter talked the usual pleasant nonsense, and vowed the usual constancy, took four separate farewells of each other, and parted, with broken accents, and lingering hand-clasps, and streaming eyes. But when Marian Ashurst sat before her toilette-glass that night, in the room which had so long been her own, and which she was so soon to vacate, she thought of what Walter Joyce had said as to his future, and wondered whether, after all, she had not miscalculated the strength, not the courage, of the knight whom she had selected to wear her colours in his helm in the great contest.

is a fact, concerning the soundness of which there can be no doubt, that we all keep by us, among our possessions, a considerable number of objects which we do not want, for which we have no possible use, which are very much in our way, and which we would be exceedingly glad to be rid of, if we only knew how. Some people, with little space at their disposal, have been so encumbered in this way with large accumulations of rubbish, inherited from many generations of collectors, that they have even been heard, after a day spent in futile attempts to deal with these unvalued possessions, to express, in the bitterness of their souls, a longing for a "judicious fire" to break out in the house. In default of that great comfort, it would be an excellent arrangement if a perambulating furnace could be brought round, at certain intervals, and moored for a time before our doors.

Incremation of this sort, however, is a way out of the difficulty only available in certain cases. Some kinds of rubbish are hardly suitable for burning. Metallic rubbish, earthenware rubbish, bone and ivory rubbish, old door