"
"Why?"
"To gain a footing here."
"Again, why?"
"For love of you."
During the silence that followed, the pair looked at each other.
"I am waiting for you to go and tell your father," said the stranger at
length.
Ruby shivered.
"I seem to have grown very old and wise," she murmured.
He kissed her lightly.
"That's the natural result of being found out. I've felt it myself.
Are you going?"
"You know that I cannot."
"You shall have twenty minutes to choose. At the end of that time I
shall pass out at the gate and look up at your window. If the blind
remain up, I go to the vicarage to put up our banns before I set off for
Plymouth. If it be drawn down, I leave this house for ever, taking
nothing from it but a suit of old clothes, a few worthless specimens
(that I shall turn out of my pockets by the first hedge), and the memory
of your face."
It happened, as he unlatched the gate, twenty minutes later, that the
blind remained up. Ruby's face was not at the window, but he kissed his
hand for all that, and smiled, and went his way singing. The air was
the very same he had whistled dumbly that morning, the air that Ruby had
speculated upon. And the words were--
"'Soldier, soldier, will you marry me,
With the bagginet, fife and drum?'
'Oh, no, pretty miss, I cannot marry you,
For I've got no coat to put on.
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