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before the appointed three years were at an end. It was, they both
agreed, not only impossible but almost wicked, to wait three years.
"Before that," said Denton--and the notes of his voice told of a
splendid chest--"we might both be dead!"
Their vigorous young hands had to grip at this, and then Elizabeth had a
still more poignant thought that brought the tears from her wholesome
eyes and down her healthy cheeks. "One of us," she said, "one of us
might be--"
She choked; she could not say the word that is so terrible to the young
and happy.
Yet to marry and be very poor in the cities of that time was--for any
one who had lived pleasantly--a very dreadful thing. In the old
agricultural days that had drawn to an end in the eighteenth century
there had been a pretty proverb of love in a cottage; and indeed in
those days the poor of the countryside had dwelt in flower-covered,
diamond-windowed cottages of thatch and plaster, with the sweet air and
earth about them, amidst tangled hedges and the song of birds, and with
the ever-changing sky overhead. But all this had changed (the change was
already beginning in the nineteenth century), and a new sort of life was
opening for the poor--in the lower quarters of the city.
In the nineteenth century the lower quarters were still beneath the sky;
they were areas of land on clay or other unsuitable soil, liable to
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