"And you're quite--quite--sure?" he dared me for the last time, his face radiant.
I brought my hand softly down on the table. "Yes!" I cried. "I'm talking what I _know_--you're only talking what you _think_!"
His small manicured hand flew out to my great one.
"Oh--bravo!" he cried. "Wait it is, then. By Jove, when it does come, you'll have deserved it!... Here, shove your glass over--I believe you're entirely right--but if it was only for your consummate cheek we should have to drink to it!"
And he filled up the two glasses with the vivid green liqueur again, touching his against mine.
I left him shortly after, or rather he left me in order to keep one of his urgent and mysterious appointments; and I wandered slowly down towards my own abode.
This was a large upper room near the Cobden Statue--a proximity that for some reason or other always afforded my partner-to-be private mirth. I had taken it because its size fitted it both for living purposes and for the storing of the things I had got against my marriage as well. It was the fourth of the five floors of a new, terra-cotta-fronted, retail drapery establishment (experience had taught me that the biggest rooms are always over shops); and from its plate-glass windows below to its sham gables held up like pieces of stage scenery by iron braces above, it was a mass of ridiculous ornament--coats of arms, swags of fruit and flowers, and feeble grotesques with horns and tails and grins, the whole looking as if it had been squeezed on from some gigantic pink icing-tube such as they use for the modelling of wedding-cakes. But I lived inside it, not outside, and I had made the place exceedingly comfortable. I had no fewer than four large windows, two looking over the High Street, one diagonally from a rounded corner, and the fourth over the little railing-enclosed garden of a neighbouring crescent. As I was high enough up to dispense with blinds and curtains, these four windows admitted a flood of admirable light on an interior that, large as it was, was over-furnished; and there was no frippery to prevent my throwing up my sashes and looking down among the terra-cotta gargoyles on the walking hats below.
Evie and I had done much of our six months' courting in second-hand dealers' shops. Resolving that our engagement should be a short one, and knowing that those who have little either of money or time have, in furnishing as in everything else, to pay through the nose for their purchases, we had started at once. What had remained of a sum of money Evie's aunt had long had in trust for her against her one day setting up housekeeping on her own account had enabled us to do this. At first the sum had been one hundred and fifty pounds; a former purchase of clothing, of which only the black garments had ever been worn, had reduced it by more than a third; and of what had become of more than half the balance my light, lofty room now bore witness.