"Five thousand pounds, my dear: not a penny less," the bishop declared impressively.
The Storm girl tingled with sudden interest, yet managed to keep her eyes closed. Then, gradually and cautiously, she lifted her heavy lashes and peeped through them. The bishop was fussing with a handbag, searching for something, taking something out, a purse of brown leather, a fat purse with a heavy elastic band around it. And, in his bland, pompous way he was telling Miss Thompson about his recent and most successful visit to America in the interest of the Progressive Mothers' Society. The Americans had been so kind to him, so generous; their contributions, together with those of Americans in Paris, amounted to this splendid sum that he was now carrying back to London.
Five thousand pounds! And he explained the extraordinary combination of circumstances that had prevented him, at the last moment, just as he was leaving Paris, from depositing this money with his bankers.
Five thousand pounds! It was evidently wiser, unquestionably safer, to remove so large a sum from his careless handbag to the shelter of his ecclesiastical coat, the inside pocket—there! And straightway the transfer was effected with a benignant smile, while the stranger sized up the situation very much as a professional golf player would study a difficult shot.
Not that Hester had any personal interest in this fat brown leather pocketbook or any designs upon it. No, no! She was done with that sort of thing, quite done with it, but from the detached standpoint of a former expert she could not help reflecting that here was an opportunity, a most unusual opportunity, if one could just see the right way of handling it.
Then she thought of the very large sum involved. Five thousand pounds! Twenty-five thousand dollars! How small it made her poor little eight hundred seem! Twenty-five thousand dollars! A fortune—all one could ever need! And there it was for the taking. There in the loosely hung black coat of an absent-minded bishop! Dear, dear, if this wonderful chance had only come sooner—before she made her good resolutions!
However, she had made them and would hold to them. She had given her promise to Rosalie, her promise true, and come what might she was going to keep straight. The bishop's purse was perfectly safe so far as she was concerned. Besides, with only three of them in the carriage, she couldn't get the purse if she wanted to. There must be other passengers, two or three others, so that the coppers would have some one besides her to put the blame on when the big squeal came. There must be at least two other passengers.
As Hester reached this purely academic conclusion the train drew up at a small station and the guard ushered in a near-sighted German music teacher, followed by a friend, who proved to be a trombone player, a very irascible person, and these two straightway fell into a heated discussion of the poisonous and non-poisonous qualities of mushrooms.
The dark-eyed dreamer smiled at the coincidence of their arrival, but remained unshaken in her resolve to leave the bishop's purse alone and all other purses likewise. Too well she remembered that little affair at the Élysêe Palace Hotel. Ugh! When Grimes fixed his cold gray eyes on her! Grimes from Scotland Yard, who happened to be in Paris on a case. Stupid man, who couldn't understand how easily a girl might mistake another woman's cloak for her own! What if it was of costly Russian sable? What did that prove? It was most annoying, and, having wriggled out of this misadventure, Hester did not propose ever again to risk another one.
Besides, it would take more than these two chattering musicians to help her. There must be a mob to shove and jostle. His nobs in the knee breeches must be standing up and somebody must push him against her or trip him up, so that in the scuffle she could sneak the leather. And now, suddenly, as Hester was fortifying herself in this prudent and virtuous decision, there came one of those trifling happenings that change the course of lives and empires—the near-sighted German music teacher crossed his legs. Whereupon the Bishop of Bunchester, who was just starting for the door, as the train drew into Chatham Junction, stumbled over the extended member and was thrown with some violence into Hester's corner, more precisely into Hester's lap, losing his glasses in transit, and was only rescued from this embarrassing position and brought again to a dignified perpendicular after much confusion with assistance and profuse apologies from the two Germans, which apologies the bishop gallantly passed on to the young woman upon whom he had so abruptly descended.