“You intend to restore this money to the Consolidated?” said Miss Fincastle eagerly.
“Not quite! The Consolidated doesn’t deserve it. You must not regard its shareholders as a set of innocent shorn lambs. They knew the game. They went in for what they could get. Besides, how could I restore the money without giving myself away? I want the money myself.”
“But you are a millionaire.”
“It is precisely because I am a millionaire that I want more. All millionaires are like that.”
“I am sorry to find you a thief, Mr. Thorold.”
“A thief! No. I am only direct, I only avoid the middleman. At dinner, Miss Fincastle, you displayed somewhat advanced views about property, marriage, and the aristocracy of brains. You said that labels were for the stupid majority, and that the wise minority examined the ideas behind the labels. You label me a thief, but examine the idea, and you will perceive that you might as well call yourself a thief. Your newspaper every day suppresses the truth about the City, and it does so in order to live. In other words, it touches the pitch, it participates in the game. To-day it has a fifty-line advertisement of a false balance-sheet of the Consolidated, at two shillings a line. That five pounds, part of the loot of a great city, will help to pay for your account of our interview this afternoon.”
“Our interview to-night,” Miss Fincastle corrected him stiffly, “and all that I have seen and heard.”
At these words she stood up, and as Cecil Thorold gazed at her his face changed.
“I shall begin to wish,” he said slowly, “that I had deprived myself of the pleasure of your company this evening.”
“You might have been a dead man had you done so,” Miss Fincastle retorted, and observing his blank countenance she touched the revolver. “Have you forgotten already?” she asked tartly.