"Oliver, you are quite too bad. I never made any plans of the kind." But there was a distinctly guilty look in Mrs. Romaine's soft eyes. "Besides, that is a piece of work which hardly needs doing. Father and daughter are too much alike to get on."
"Alike, are they?"
"Yes, in a sense. The girl is very like her mother, too—she has Lady Alice's features and figure, but the expression of her face is her father's. And her eyes and her brow are her father's. And she is like her father—I think—in disposition."
"You have found out so much that I think you scarcely need me to interview her in order to tell you more. What do you want me to do?"
"I want to find out more about Lady Alice. Could you not get Ethel Kenyon to ask her about her mother, and then persuade Ethel to tell you?"
"Can't take Ethel into our confidence," said Oliver with a disparaging emphasis upon the name. "She is such a little fool." And then he began to roll a cigarette for himself.
Mrs. Romaine watched him thoughtfully for a minute or two. "Noll," she said at length, "I thought you were really fond of Ethel?"
Oliver's eyes were fixed upon the cigarette that he was now lighting, and, perhaps, that was the reason why he did not answer for a minute or two. At last, he said, in his soft, drawling way—
"I am very fond of Ethel. And especially of the twenty thousand pounds that her uncle left her."
"Ethel Kenyon is handsome enough to be loved for something beside her money."