"No! Let it alone, pray, Julia!" Harvey spoke sharply, for once even roughly. "The less said the better, I tell you. Pray don't meddle."
Julia scrutinised him in wonder, rather hurt. "Of course I will not speak to Hermione without your leave," she said. "But do you suppose that Mr. Dalrymple did not intend to leave her something—if he had lived a little longer?"
Harvey's look grew hard again. "Possibly," he said.
"If he did—!" Julia's black eyes, soft now as Mittie's, were bent upon him, and her second hand came with the first, holding his arm captive. "If Mr. Dalrymple did intend, and we knew it, should we not be bound to give to Hermione what he had meant her to have?"
"Certainly not."
"Are you sure?"
A red flush had come to Harvey's forehead—not a smooth brow now, but lined and ratted. The flush spread slowly.
"I see no particular object in such suppositions."
"No, for of course we do not know that he meant anything of the kind. Only perhaps the people about here fancy that it is so. I could not understand at first what old Sutton meant, but it may be that. What do you think?"
He shrugged his shoulders slightly. It was an occasional gesture with him, the only un-English result of long residence abroad.