“No, that’s the worst of it. I did not care about the Army—I wanted to be a sailor, and my mother struck; and here I am—at twenty-four—an incapable idiot!”
“But you can turn your hand to something.”
“I can ride to hounds, and manage a boat, I’m a bit of a carpenter, I can photograph, and I know something of machinery.”
“There’s not a penny in any of them for you,” declared the old man brusquely; “you’re a hamateur.”
“I was thinking if I took up a small farm, sir, I might——”
“Put it out of your ’ead,” brusquely interrupted Mr. Pottinger; “and now I’ve been thinking, and it comes to this. Of course I could say you and Nancy was never to see one another again.”
“Yes, you could say it,” rejoined the other significantly.
“Nancy will never go against me; if she did——” Here he nodded his head with alarming significance.
“Have you any suggestion to make, sir? You seemed to have some proposition.”
“I ’ave—it’s this. Suppose you go off for three years wherever you like—it must be out of Great Britain—and you will not correspond with Nancy more than every six months. You will go into the world like a man, not like a dressed-up young nincompoop, and make ten thousand pounds. When you bring me that, I will put forty thousand to it and give you Nancy.”