“Which I will fill in when you have signed.”
“Ah! How long will you give me to consider this extraordinary proposal of yours?”
“Exactly five minutes,” said Spenser Churchill blandly; “and excuse me, my dear Percy, if I say that that is four minutes too long! My dear young friend, consider! A young, refined, accomplished lady, with a future fortune of at least twenty thousand a year—and you hesitate. Are you so fond of Soho, and this rather—excuse me—squalid life of yours? Think what a vista this opens before you? You are ambitious. I present you with a golden ladder by which you may climb to any height you please. What are your prospects now, save those of a lifelong drudgery with the workhouse at the end? You, whose gifts warrant your taking your place among the flower of the land——”
“Wait, wait!” interrupted Percy. “I can’t think with your drivel buzzing in my ears! I want to think! Man alive, I can scarcely believe that this is sober earnest, and if it were not for the price you exact, I should find it impossible to do so; but now I see your game, or part of it——” he wandered to the piano as he spoke, and dropping into his music chair, abstractly let his hands stray over the keys.
“I think more easily to music,” he murmured, dreamily.
Spenser Churchill watched him in silence for a few minutes, then he said:
“Time is up, my dear Percy. Is it to be ‘Yes,’ or ‘No?’”
The young fellow rose from the piano; his face was pale, and his eyes glowing with a strange excitement.
“I cannot resist it!” he said, in a low voice, whose tremor belied his faint smile. “You are right—more right than you guessed—when you said I was ambitious. I am sick and weary of this life of squalid drudgery. I feel as if I would sell my soul—perhaps I am doing it!—to get out of it. Give me the paper and I’ll sign it!”
Spenser Churchill spread it on the table, and Percy Levant snatched up a pen and wrote his name.