Because of that belief she welcomed the wealth, which she would this day be able to place in his hands. Her own girlish dreams had vanished, but her temperament was far too romantic and too poetic not to recreate illusions, even when the old ones had been so ruthlessly shattered.
But this recreation would occur anon—not just now, not at the very moment when her heart ached with an intolerable pain at thought of the sorrow which she had caused to her one friend. Presently, no doubt, when she met her husband, when his usual grandiloquent phrases had once more succeeded in arousing her enthusiasm for the cause which he pleaded, she would once more feel serene and happy at thought of the help which she, with her great wealth, would be giving him; for the nonce the whole transaction grated on her sense of romance; money passing from hand to hand, a man waiting somewhere in the dark to receive wealth from a woman's hand.
Master Skyffington desired her to look over the papers, ere she signed the formal receipt for them, but she waved them gently aside:
"Quite unnecessary, kind master," she said decisively, "since I receive them at your hands."
She bent over the document which the lawyer now placed before her, and took the pen from him.
"Where shall I sign?" she asked.
Sir Marmaduke and Editha de Chavasse watched her keenly, as with a bold stroke of the pen she wrote her name across the receipt.
"Now the papers, please, master," said Lady Sue peremptorily.
But the prudent lawyer had still a word of protest to enter here.
"My dear young lady," he said tentatively, awed in spite of himself by the self-possessed behavior of a maid whom up to now he had regarded as a mere child, "let me, as a man of vast experience in such matters, repeat to you the well-meant advice which Sir Marmaduke . . ."