n't seem to be able to pass any exams,
but I can make awful caricatures of the masters. Ho! Ho!'

'Be an artist, then,' said Maisie. 'You're always laughing at my trying
to draw; and it will do you good.'

'I'll never laugh at anything you do,' he answered. 'I'll be an artist,
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.

'I was playing with it, and it went off by itself,' said Dick, when the
powder-pocked cheek could no longer be hidden, 'but if you think you're
going to lick me you're wrong. You are never going to touch me again.

Sit down and give me my tea. You can't cheat us out of that, anyhow.'

Mrs. Jennett gasped and became livid. Maisie said nothing, but
encouraged Dick with her eyes, and he behaved abominably all that
evening. Mrs. Jennett prophesied an immediate judgment of Providence and
a descent into Tophet later, but Dick walked in Paradise and would not
hear. Only when he was going to bed Mrs. Jennett recovered and asserted
herself. He had bidden Maisie good-night with down-dropped eyes and from
a distance.

'If you aren't a gentleman you might try to behave like one,' said Mrs.

Jennett, spitefully. 'You've been quarrelling with Maisie again.'

This meant that the usual good-night kiss had been omitted. Maisie,
white to the lips, thrust