"Yes. She's living with her daughter. Lady Carleigh, you know. She said her son-in-law, Sir Caryll, was extremely influential, and if I'd buy the shares he would use his influence to get me the baronetcy. As if I'd give tuppence for it!"
He paused, and Nina remained thoughtfully silent. Poor Caryll! So his mother-in-law was on his hands once more.
Gerald looked up at the moon, and a wave of sentiment swept over him. He had seen it dozens of times since that night in Simla. But it had never seemed so much the same moon as it did this night.
Probably it was because of his meeting with Mrs. Ramsay, which brought back the Simla days and nights more vividly than ever before.
On such a night as this he had asked Nina Darling to bolt with him, and she had cruelly sent him away hopeless. Since meeting her again he had let his actions rather than his words speak for him, and she had been very kind.
He didn't wish to spoil it all again—to be sent away with his new-risen hopes all a-droop. He had made up his mind to wait until Kneedrock had been a year under the gray stones of Dumphreys Abbey, but it was hard to resist the sentimental influence of this night and this moon—this Simla moon.
"I don't want Mrs. O'Connor's paper," he said at length dreamily, "or her son-in-law's influence, or a baronetcy, or anything else in all the world except—"
Nina knew those tones. She had heard them rise from many hearts in her time, and they roused her from the reverie into which she had fallen. Hitherto they had come to her as the final warning signal.
It had been her habit at this point to gird on her armor and draw her sword for the supreme blow of severance. But somehow there seemed no armor at her command now, and her sword was dulled and rusted and wouldn't fit her hand.
So she looked up at the moon, too, and in a voice that had in it the very identical tone, only very low and very soft, she echoed his last word—echoed it with the slightest questioning inflexion.