"Toss me?" she exclaimed, startled.
"Ay! I'll toss thee, if thou'lt stay. Heads I buy the barracks; tails I don't, and you live with me in a house."
"Very well," she agreed, lightly.
He had not really expected her to agree to such a scheme. But, then, young women named Helen can be trusted absolutely to falsify expectation.
He took a sixpence from his pocket.
"Heads I win, eh?" he said.
She acquiesced, and up went the sixpence.
It rolled off the table on to the Turkey carpet (Jimmy was not so adroit as he had been in his tossing days), and seven Austrians, Germans, and Swiss sprang towards it with a simultaneous impulse to restore it to its owner.
Jimmy jumped to his feet.
"Don't touch it!" he cried, and bent over it.