Aunt spoke of the Right Honorable Everard as though she held him like a purse in her pocket, and Dale at one period had some queer thoughts about this old widow of a dead servant for whom so much had been done and who yet expected so much more. She said Mr. Barradine had charged himself with the musical training of another niece, and he would probably not hesitate to send Mavis to Vienna for the best masters, should she presently display any natural talent. Her cousin Ruby sang like an angel from the age of ten; but Mavis so far exhibited more inclination for instrumental music.
"She'll belie her name, though, if she doesn't pipe up some day, won't she?"
When Dale secured his appointment at Portsmouth, he and Mavis were not engaged. She said, "Auntie simply won't hear of it."
"Not now," he said. "But later, when I've made my way, she'll come round. Mav, will you wait for me?
"Oh, I don't know," said Mavis. "I can't give any promise. I must do whatever Auntie tells me. I can't go against her wishes."
Yet somehow he felt sure that she would be his. A thousand slimy, humbugging old aunts should not keep them apart. From Portsmouth he wrote a letter to his sweetheart on every day of the year for three years--except on those days of joyous leave when he could get away and talk to her instead of writing to her. At the end of the three years the postmastership at Rodchurch became vacant, and he boldly applied for the place.
His life just then was almost too glorious to be true. All difficulties and dangers seemed to melt away in a sort of warm haze of rapture. Mrs. Petherick no longer opposed the marriage; Mr. Barradine, at the zenith of political power, exerted his influence; the postmastership was obtained. To top up, Dale made the not unpleasing discovery that Mavis was an heiress as well as an orphan. She had two hundred pounds of her very own, "which came in uncommon handy for the furnishing."
And his education did not cease with wedlock. Mavis was always improving him, especially in regard to diction. He was pleased to think that he made very few slips nowadays--an "h" elided here and there; the vowels still rather broad, more particularly the Hampshire "a"; and one or two unchanged words, such as "boosum." But these microscopic faults were of no consequence, and Mav had stopped teasing him about them. She only warned him of what he knew was Gospel truth--that the little failures were more frequent under hurry or excitement, and that when deeply moved he had a tendency to lapse badly toward the ancient peasant lingo.