“All right, then,” said the young man roughly, “let’s be practical. I know what you’re thinking. I’m a clerk in a dud firm that pays me two pounds ten shillings a week, which is probably about two pounds nine shillings more than I’m worth. I have been there four years and my prospects of getting any further are precisely nil. You have a dress allowance of fifty pounds a year, and if your father can raise it to a hundred when you’re married you will be lucky. Being what are known as gentlefolk, we can’t get married under seven hundred a year—say six hundred as a bare minimum. And if we tried it even on that we should hate it, and your father would have seventeen distinct apoplectic fits if we suggested it. Is that practical enough for you?”

“Yes,” said Susan in a small sad voice.

“Therefore,” he continued, “it ill becomes me to spend fifteen shillings on a decent meal, when I might be putting it in a nice little savings bank, like that ghastly young pup who shares my room at the office.”

Susan made a gesture of despair.

“It does seem pretty hopeless, doesn’t it?” she said. Harper looked out past her at the grey prospect of Goodge Street.

“I hate London,” he said suddenly.

A silence followed his outburst, and when he spoke again it was in a different tone of voice.

“Susan,” he said diffidently, “I’ve had a letter from a fellow I know out in Kenya. He’s got a farm there—sisal, coffee and so on. There’s not much money in it nowadays, he says, but it’s a good sort of life. If he could take me on—would you come?”

She clapped her hands in joy.

“Darling!” she cried. “But this is marvellous! Why on earth have you kept so quiet about it? You didn’t really think I wouldn’t come, did you?” Then seeing the irresolute expression on his face, she added: “Frank, there’s something else in this. What is it?”

“Yes, there is something else,” he answered unwillingly, as though regretting that he had said so much already as to make further disclosure necessary. “There is something else. What this man is offering is a partnership in the farm.”

“M-m?”

“And he wants fifteen hundred pounds for it.”

“O-oh!” Susan’s castle in Kenya tumbled in a long drawn sigh of disappointment. “What is the good of talking about things like that? Frank, I thought you were being practical!”

He flushed darkly.

“Perhaps I am,” he muttered.

“What do you mean? Frank, you make me angry sometimes. You know you haven’t got fifteen hundred pounds or the remotest chance of getting it——”

“Suppose I had?”