ulty in understanding her meaning. She
sat down in a chair by the window, and stared at the maid with serious
eyes.

"Do you love him, Mury? Enough to marry him, and live beside him every
one day to the end of your life? You think you would not get--_tired_?"

Mary hesitated, unwilling to commit herself. "I wouldn't like to go so
far as that," she announced judicially. "He aggravates me at times
something cruel, but I'd sooner be aggravated by him nor anyone else.
They talk a lot of rubbish about love, Miss Cornelia, but that's about
the size of it when all's said and done. Some people suit you and
others don't, and all the lovey-doveying in the world won't make 'em--"

"Why, Mury, you are a philosopher! It's the dead truth, Mury, but I
guess you needn't rub it in.--If you've made up your mind, why need you
wait?"

"Furniture, miss! I've told him I won't marry to go into rooms, not if
it's ever so. I'll wait till I get a 'ome of me own. He'd put by a
goodish bit, and so had I, but things have been agen us. He was out of
work four months last winter, and mother's legs are a awful drain--
liniments, and bandages, and what-not. You can't see your own mother
suffer, and not pay out. We've got to wait till we save up again."

"How much money does it take to furnish a cottage over here, Mury?"

"That depends on how it's done. You can do it 'an'some for forty
pounds. I lived with a girl who did hers for twenty, but I wouldn't
like to be as close as that. I reckon about thirty."

"Thirty pounds! One hundred and fifty dollars!" Cornelia gasped in
astonishment at the smallness of the sum. "You can't mean that that
includes everything--chairs and tables, and carpets, and dishes, and
beds, and bureaus, and brooms, and tins, and curtains, and fire-irons--
and all the fixing to put 'em up! It isn't possible you can get them
all for a hundred and fifty dollars!"

"You can, miss. There's a shop in the Fore Street where they do you
everything complete for three rooms for thirty pounds, with a velvet
suite for the parlour. Lady's chair, gent's chair, sofa, and four
uprights, with chiffonnier, and overmantel, and all. You couldn't wish
for anything better. The girl I lived with had only a few odd bits--I'd
be ashamed to have such a poor sort of parlour.--In the kitchen they
give you a dresser, and a flap-table, and linoleum on the floor. Jim
and me went to the shop one day to have a look round. ... That w