Mr., or, as he loved to be designated, Captain Jenkyns, had once followed the sea. But that was a long time ago. The serious part of his life had been spent on a Thames steamer. The outer man was nautical, and the carnal inner, as an inveterate craving for fiery drink clearly proved; but many years of fresh water seemed to have washed the true sailor’s kindly salt out of his nature. He was a thick-set, grizzled old man, with bibulous superannuation written on every wrinkle that mounted to his little red-rimmed eyes, and in every filament of the network of tiny red veins on his nose.

He was sitting in the leathern arm-chair, with his back to the parlour window, drinking his tea out of a saucer. Goddard and Lizzie sat decorously at the tea-table. It was a ceremonious occasion, as the use of the parlour, the potted ham and seed-cake on the table, Captain Jenkyns’s brass-buttoned coat, and the little blue ribbon round Lizzie’s neck, with the bow tied kittenishly under her ear, all combined to testify. Previously Goddard used to join the domestic circle in the kitchen, but then he had never been to Birmingham nor opened a banking account at the City Bank. That made all the difference.

So far, conversation had not been animated. Goddard had conducted it practically alone, sketching his visit to Birmingham, which had terminated to his complete satisfaction. An offer for the shop and good-will was already under consideration. The solicitors had advanced him a good round sum for present needs.

“To keep a shop warn’t good enough for yer, I suppose,” Captain Jenkyns had remarked in his agreeable way.

“No,” Goddard had answered coldly—he did not love the captain. “It wasn’t.”

And then he had proceeded with his story. But the talk languished. Lizzie, never expansive in her father’s presence, was less so to-day than usual. Goddard’s sudden accession to wealth—riches beyond the dreams of Lizzie’s avarice—somewhat awed her, after the first excitement had passed. His cleverness, his personality, all in fact that differentiated him from Joe Forster the tobacconist and his class, had always put him a little beyond her reach; but now that he was a rich man as well, she felt frightened and abashed. She offered him bread and butter timidly, and flushed scarlet when she awkwardly flooded his tea-cup. Then crumbs of cake went the wrong way, and she retired to the window to hide her discomfiture.

“And now you’re a hindependent gentleman,” said the old man after a pause, setting down his saucer. “I suppose you won’t want to be thinking of marrying my gell.”

Goddard sprang to his feet. He had his own reasons for feeling stung to the quick.

“You have no right to say that,” he cried hotly. “What do you take me for?”

The ex-captain made the motion of “Ease her!” with his hand, and chuckled.

“Do you think I don’t know human natur’, when I’ve seed boat-loads of it every day for sixty years?”

“Well, you don’t know my nature,” said Daniel. “Lizzie, come here. We’ll soon settle that matter.”

Lizzie turned from the window and advanced towards him, flushing uncomfortably.

“Damme! I don’t want you to marry her. I don’t care a tinker’s damn,” said the old man with unreasonable heat, as Goddard met Lizzie and took her by the hand. “I ain’t going down on my bended knees to ask you to marry her.”

“Oh, father! don’t,” said Lizzie on the brink of tears.

“Never mind,” said Goddard. “I want to marry you, and I’m going to marry you. I’ll have the banns put up next Sunday.”

“Why don’t you have a special licence at once?” growled the Captain sarcastically.

“Because I know my own business best,” said Goddard.

“Then I’m blarsted if you’ll have her at all!”

“Don’t make a scene, father,” Lizzie entreated. She tried to slip away, but Goddard’s arm tightened and restrained her. He looked with disgust on the ignoble old face that blinked in cantankerous dignity. Save on the ground of pure ill-temper he could not understand his outburst. Lizzie had often told him of the awful rows she had had with her father about nothing at all. But Goddard was not the man to be bullied.

“Lizzie is over twenty-one, and I’m going to marry her whether you are blasted or not, Captain Jenkyns. You can take that from me.”

“Then you’re a ———er fool than I took you for,” replied the Captain, giving in beneath the young fellow’s strong gaze. “Marry in haste; repent at leisure. You want to make a lady of her. She ain’t going to be no lady. It’s only going to set her off her ’ead. Think she’s going to recognise her poor old father when she lives in a fine ’ouse and dressed in silks and satins? Not a bit of it. I know human natur’, I tell yer. I brought her up to be an honest working man’s wife. That’s what she’s fit for. So that she could give me a bit of dinner on Sundays. Now you’re a going to take her away from her natural surroundings, what she was born in, and make her neither flesh, nor fowl, nor good red ’erring. Think I don’t know? And you, with your ’igh-falutin’ idea about being too good to keep a shop, you ought to marry a duchess instead of a poor old sailor’s gell: that’s what you ought to do.”

He produced a flat bottle of rum from his side pocket, filled his half-emptied tea-cup with spirits, and drank the compound to console his poor old sailor’s paternal heart.

Goddard, seeing that the storm was over, smiled at the mixture of shrewdness and selfishness in the old man’s speech. Certain home-truths made him wince a little; but the prospect of Captain Jenkyns not finding a seat at his Sunday dinner-table did not present itself to him as in any way pathetic.

“Well,” he said good-humouredly, “I am not going to marry a duchess, but a girl as sweet as one. Isn’t that true, Liz? And so there’s an end to the matter. I suppose I can count on you to give her away, Captain?”

“Yes, I’ll give her away. Jolly good riddance,” growled the old man.

A short while afterwards he rose, filled his clay pipe with cavendish, which he ground fine between his hands, and excusing himself on the score of business, left the two young people to themselves. His destination, however, was a far-off river-side public, where he spent the rest of the evening with his cronies, and informed them, in speech that grew gradually more marked by thickness and profanity, of the approaching splendour of his daughter’s fortunes.

“Cheer up, Lizzie,” said Goddard, as she began to clear away the tea-things in silence. “We neither of us mind what he says.”

“He makes me so ashamed,” said Lizzie. “I didn’t know where to look. He’s been at it ever since you’ve been away, saying as how you would want to back out; and he made me quite miserable, he did.”

The baby-blue eyes filled with tears. Goddard consoled her as best he could.

“There, there, don’t cry,” he said, patting her shoulder with his great hand. “The banns will be put up next Sunday, as I said; and three weeks won’t be long, you know; and then it will all be over, and we’ll start fair. Leave those things alone for the present, and let us talk about it.”

So they sat, side by side, over the fire, and spoke of the near future. They would live in lodgings until they could find a house to suit them. They discussed the size of the house, its position, the furniture, the question of servants. They came nearer the present, and Goddard counted out into her hand six crisp bank-notes wherewith to buy her trousseau. Lizzie’s mind swam in ecstatic wonderment.

“All this—for me?” she whispered, awestricken.

“Yes, and as much more if you like. I am going to get a new rig out, so why shouldn’t you?”

“Oh, Dan,” she broke out suddenly, throwing her arms round his neck, “I didn’t quite know whether I loved you before—but I do now—Dan!”

There followed an interlude, during which the future was left in abeyance.

“And I was wondering how I was going to get a wedding-dress. Emmie and I have talked for hours over it. Won’t I get a beauty now! White satin with a long, long train. I saw one yesterday in a fashion-plate—oh! just lovely.”

“I suppose you won’t feel married otherwise,” he said, with a quiet smile. And then, seeing a quick shadow of dismay on her face, he laughed and kissed her. “You shall drive to the church in a coach and four, with the horses’ manes and tails all tied up with orange-blossoms, if you like.”

She saw he was jesting kindly, and joined in the laugh—but perfunctorily. The wedding-dress was the ecstatic, enrapturing part of the ceremony. To jest upon it savoured of profanity.

After a while Lizzie returned to the tea-things, and, aided by Daniel, washed them up in the kitchen.

“Only fancy! I am going to have servants to do this for me ever afterwards,” she said brightly.

The possession of the trousseau money had strongly influenced the girl’s facile temperament. The changed fortune ceased to be shadowy and disquieting. It had assumed already a comforting, concrete form. The overwhelming realisation of the potential finery that lay in those crisp notes had crushed any feelings of delicacy in accepting the gift. The first wondering delight and childlike impulse of gratitude to Goddard was succeeded by a new sense of personal importance. Her garments would be dazzling—the thought of them raised her to a height whence she could almost look down upon Daniel. She no longer felt shy or constrained.

They returned to the parlour, a prim little room, with a pervading impression of horse-hair, crocheted antimacassars, woolly mats and wax-fruit, and again envisaged the future. Lizzie sat in her father’s arm-chair, her hands deliciously idle in her lap, her mind all transcendental millinery. Goddard rested his elbow on the table, pushed back his hair from his forehead, and looked at her gravely.

“It’s not all going to be beer and skittles, you know, Liz,” he said. “Although I have chucked the working-man, I am going in for precious hard work all the same.”

“Why, whatever for, when you haven’t your living to get?” she asked in surprise.

Like the apocryphal British workman, Lizzie hated work, and hated those that liked it. She saw no point in unnecessary labour.

“No,” said Goddard, his face lighting up with the impulse of reply. “Not my own living to get, thank God, but I have to help others to get theirs. I may not be able to do much. But when a lot of men work together, every little effort of each tells. And I mean, too, to come to the front, Liz, for the nearer the front a man is, the bigger the things he can do. And the front means a big position in Parliament, and that’s what I’m going to try and get before I die. If I don’t, it won’t be for want of fighting. But it will be a long time coming, and will take me all I know. That’s why I didn’t take over the shop in Birmingham.”

“Oh, that’s why?” said Lizzie, trying to look sympathetic.

“Of course. You see it wasn’t because I suddenly became too big for my boots—but I wanted all my time to myself for this other work. I have made a fair start. I know something about the inner workings of things already, and I can get men to listen to me when I speak. So I am going to work like a nigger, Liz.”

She sat silent and plucked at her dress. It was very wonderful and clever of Daniel to talk about becoming a Member of Parliament, but she could not in the least see why it was necessary for him to work like a nigger. In her heart she regretted the hosier’s shop, but she was afraid to tell him so. She looked up at him and smiled, with the outside of her features as it were, after the manner of dutiful yet uninterested woman. Goddard, encouraged, continued to unfold his schemes. He was in intense earnest, and spoke to her, as he had never spoken before, of the burning questions of the day—the unequal struggle between labour and capital, the iniquity of the living wage, the stupendous problem of the unemployed, the great reforms on whose behalf he felt summoned forth to fight. And as the passion grew upon him, his voice vibrated and his eyes glowed, and his words waxed eloquent. He broke the bonds of his usual speech with her, partly through a need of expansion, partly through a half-conscious desire to awaken a little of the girl’s sympathy.

When he had done, and a little pause had followed, she looked up from the puckering of her dress.

“That’s all lovely, Dan,” she said; “but what am I to do?”

The question brought his thoughts down from the empyrÆan like a gash in a balloon.

“Well, there will be the house to look after,” he said, in an altered tone; “and then—well—there will be babies—and lots of things,” he concluded lamely.

“Oh, I don’t like babies,” said Lizzie, with frank inconsequence. “They always want such a lot of fussing after, and they’re always squalling. I’m sure I shall want to smack them. Nasty little things.”

He looked at her rather perplexedly. It was a delicate subject. She caught his glance and coloured.

“You shouldn’t go saying such things,” she murmured, giggling in embarrassment—“and we not married yet!”

Then something seemed to catch him by the heart, a queer chilly grip, and tug it downwards. He blamed himself for having suggested the idea, although he had done so without shadowing thoughts. The innuendo jarred upon him—he could not tell why.

“I am sorry,” he said gravely.

There was a silence for some time. Goddard idly turned over the leaves of a rickety album filled with faded photographs of stiff, staring people in the costume of the sixties.

Lizzie lay back in her chair, and devised the white satin wedding-dress. At last she called to him softly.

“Dan.”

He turned, saw her reclining there, smiling at him. Her cheeks were so pink, her fair hair so bewilderingly soft and fluffy, her parted lips so fresh and inviting, her young figure so cleanly cut, in spite of the ill-fitting dress and cheap corsets beneath, her white throat set off by the coquettish blue ribbon so alluring, that the heart of the young man, who knew little of the ways and fascinations of women, threw off the cold grip in a great quick throb.

“You haven’t given me a kiss all the time, Dan,” she said without stirring.

Well, he rose and kissed her.

And the next day he called on the vicar of the parish, and settled the question of the banns. It was over. He felt lighter. There is nothing that is more irksome to a strong-willed man than indecision, and Goddard had passed through a period of grave misgiving.

On his way down the path to the vicarage gate, however, he met Mr. Aloysius Gleam just entering it. The Member let fall his gold-rimmed eye-glass in some surprise, as he greeted him.

“What, more miracles? You in the house of Rimmon?” he exclaimed, for Goddard had been a thorn in the vicar’s flesh for some time past.

“I’m going to get married,” replied Goddard, by way of explanation.

The Member drooped his shoulders and lowered the point of his stick in a helpless attitude, and looked at him with an air of dismay. “What are you doing it for? Just when you ought to be going round the country like a firebrand. Now you’ll be a damp faggot. I know. Go back and tell the vicar you didn’t mean it. It was an elaborate ‘draw’ on your part.”

Daniel stuck his hands in his pockets and laughed.

“I feel inclined to answer you like Touchstone,” he said.

“The deuce you do,” said Gleam.

A quick glance passed between them, and a shade of annoyance came over Goddard’s dark face. The analogy perhaps was closer than he intended. The other might retort with the gibes of Jacques.

“Of course it isn’t my business,” added Gleam in a deprecating tone. “But it might have been better for you to have waited—considering the change in your fortune, and your scheme of life generally. Well, I suppose folks will marry. It is even within the bounds of possibility I may do it myself one of these days.”

He put up his eye-glass and passed his fingers over his tight fair moustache, as if to prepare himself for the ordeal.

“It won’t interfere with any of our plans, I can assure you,” said Goddard.

“That’s right. Don’t let it, for goodness’ sake. But marriage is a function of two independent variables, as they say in the differential calculus—and a deuced tough function too. Anyhow, if you’re bent upon it, I wish you luck.”

They shook hands and parted. Goddard turned away slowly.

The Member’s words sounded again the note of warning, the same note that had rung in those of the old man on the previous day, the same that had rung in his own ears.

“But I should have been a knave to have done differently,” he thought to himself. “There was only one alternative.”

He had deliberately chosen the part of the fool.

“I am damned glad,” he said aloud, swinging his stick. “I’ll walk straight, now and ever afterwards, whatever happens.”

Three weeks afterwards they were married, and Lizzie’s wedding-dress, to her trembling joy, was fully described in the Sunington Weekly Chronicle.