“Such as what?” asked Jack. “If you love one another that’s the main thing, isn’t it?”
“You dear, unsophisticated child!” laughed Miss Garwood. “That’s only one thing. We should have to live after we were married, you see.”
“Well, I suppose Joe has enough money for that,” Jack commented. “And then you have plenty of money yourself, or your father has.”
“Yes,” Miss Garwood agreed; “but papa has his own ideas of what would be a suitable match for me. I’m not sure he would approve of Joe—I mean Mr. Kent. Confidentially, Jack, how much do you suppose he is worth?”
“I never supposed,” said Jack shortly. “His income may be one thousand or ten thousand a year; I don’t know. You aren’t marrying him for his money.”
“I haven’t decided to marry him at all, you goose,” said Miss Garwood lightly. “It will be time enough to make up my mind when he asks me.”
Nevertheless she lay awake for half an hour that night, thinking. Her flirtation with Joe had reached a point for thought. She wondered how Hugh Garwood would regard him as a prospective son-in-law. Finding the answer rather doubtful, she sighed, turned her facile mind to something else, and almost immediately slept.
For hours after her guest slumbered, Jack Crooks stared from her bed at the treetops outside the window, and watched the patch of moonlight on the floor slowly shift and finally disappear. And this sleeplessness was the more unaccountable because she told herself again that she didn’t care whether Joe married Edith or not. She was quite honest about it.
“But I didn’t like her questions about his money,” she reflected. “She has or will have enough for both. I know if I were in love—which thank goodness I’m not—the amount of money a young man had would be the last thing I’d think of. I don’t believe dad would think of it either, just so we had enough to live on, and good prospects. Of course not. She can’t think much of Joe if she lets that stand in the way. If he isn’t exactly rich he can’t be poor. Mr. Kent was as well off as dad, I should think. Oh, dear! I’ve simply got to go to sleep.” And finally she did, just as the faintest light grew in the east.
Meanwhile, Joe Kent was doing a little soul searching himself, without coming to any definite conclusion. He liked Edith Garwood, and he suffered acute jealousy when she accepted the marked attentions of others; but to save his life he couldn’t make up his mind whether he would care to look at her across his breakfast coffee as long as they both should live. The question of money occurred to him, but not as an important factor. He knew that old Hugh Garwood, the president of the O. & N. Railway, had it to burn, to throw at the birds, to stuff cats with, and half a dozen other ways of disposition. But he himself had enough to keep a wife in the modest comfort which had always been his. He was clean, healthy, well educated, and owned a business which, though encumbered, was perfectly solvent. Therefore he considered himself, without egotism, eligible for the hand of any girl, no matter how wealthy her father might be.