“If I did love you, I would not marry you:  I would certainly not promise ever to marry you.”

“I think that is quite wicked, Mary.  If you love me, you ought to promise to marry me.”

“On the contrary, I think it would be wicked in me to marry you even if I did love you.”

“You mean, just as I am, without any means of maintaining a wife.  Of course:  I am but three-and-twenty.”

“In that last point you will alter.  But I am not so sure of any other alteration.  My father says an idle man ought not to exist, much less, be married.”

“Then I am to blow my brains out?”

“No; on the whole I should think you would do better to pass your examination.  I have heard Mr. Farebrother say it is disgracefully easy.”

“That is all very fine.  Anything is easy to him.  Not that cleverness has anything to do with it.  I am ten times cleverer than many men who pass.”

“Dear me!” said Mary, unable to repress her sarcasm; “that accounts for the curates like Mr. Crowse.  Divide your cleverness by ten, and the quotient—­dear me!—­is able to take a degree.  But that only shows you are ten times more idle than the others.”

“Well, if I did pass, you would not want me to go into the Church?”

“That is not the question—­what I want you to do.  You have a conscience of your own, I suppose.  There! there is Mr. Lydgate.  I must go and tell my uncle.”

“Mary,” said Fred, seizing her hand as she rose; “if you will not give me some encouragement, I shall get worse instead of better.”

“I will not give you any encouragement,” said Mary, reddening.  “Your friends would dislike it, and so would mine.  My father would think it a disgrace to me if I accepted a man who got into debt, and would not work!”

Fred was stung, and released her hand.  She walked to the door, but there she turned and said:  “Fred, you have always been so good, so generous to me.  I am not ungrateful.  But never speak to me in that way again.”

“Very well,” said Fred, sulkily, taking up his hat and whip.  His complexion showed patches of pale pink and dead white.  Like many a plucked idle young gentleman, he was thoroughly in love, and with a plain girl, who had no money!  But having Mr. Featherstone’s land in the background, and a persuasion that, let Mary say what she would, she really did care for him, Fred was not utterly in despair.

When he got home, he gave four of the twenties to his mother, asking her to keep them for him.  “I don’t want to spend that money, mother.  I want it to pay a debt with.  So keep it safe away from my fingers.”

“Bless you, my dear,” said Mrs. Vincy.  She doted on her eldest son and her youngest girl (a child of six), whom others thought her two naughtiest children.  The mother’s eyes are not always deceived in their partiality:  she at least can best judge who is the tender, filial-hearted child.  And Fred was certainly very fond of his mother.  Perhaps it was his fondness for another person also that made him particularly anxious to take some security against his own liability to spend the hundred pounds.  For the creditor to whom he owed a hundred and sixty held a firmer security in the shape of a bill signed by Mary’s father.