The Argosy — page 65: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Molly at the ‘‘ Mitre.” 55 and shaking that it was as well to give some excuse for it. “ But I thought you would want your packet—and—and I knew where it was . . ‘Did you send for me? not Jack ?” “Yes.” “Then you cared, Molly ?” “Of course I did!” A great many unexpected things happen every day ; others, which appear certain, are curiously averted at the last moment. Harry Hayward’s proposal never came off at the Worcester Féte after all: which was a great disappointment to him and to Lady Bussell and to old Mr. Hayward down at Coombe, who thought he had arranged so cleverly for his son’s early marriage with his special favourite, Lady Bussell’s pretty niece. Family arrangements do not always hold good if the young people on both sides have not been consulted. But, luckily, Harry Hayward was young enough to get over his disappointment long before he took his degree. ‘From information received,” Lady Bussell excused her niece from appearing at the evening féte. She was justly indignant, poor lady, at the advantage that had been taken of her; and most of her wrath was levelled at young Forbes, who had insisted on taking them round by innumerable quadrangles to look for 2 moon which they discovered did not rise till 2 a.m. Had she gone straight back to the hotel, there would have been no opportunity for this stupid quixotic entanglement of Molly’s with a man without a penny, and she would quietly have fallen in with her aunt’s plans and accepted Harry. Jack, too, was angry for his chum’s sake, and immensely annoyed on his own account that he had never had a notion of how the land lay. But he was too just to deny that Ransome was a first-rate fellow, and that Molly, “ with her economical ways and her continual preach- ing about work and duty and all that,” could but make an excellent wife fora poor man. ‘Besides, Molly's three hundred a-year would have been lost among Hayward’s thousands, whereas it will make quite a sensation among Ransome’s people!” This reflection gave Jack considerable satisfaction after he had got over his first vexation. And when the Lists were published, George Ransome’s name was among the Honours, and as she read it, Molly, though she was not | given to tears, felt a great lump rise in her throat and a mist come across her eyes, through which she seemed to see the bright sunshine and the shifting groups of the High Street from the windows of the “ Mitre.” P| comicbooks.com