“In case I moved?” said Patricia, knitting her brows. Suddenly she sat up. “D’you mean you’d ’ve waited on me?”
“Of course,” said Simon. “Even with the money behind me, I couldn’t ’ve given tongue. I love you better, Pat, than heaven and earth, and I wouldn’t give you up now for fifty rolling worlds—but if you hadn’t spoken I couldn’t have opened my mouth. But then you did speak, lady. You wrote me the sweetest letter that ever—— What is it, Pat?”
Patricia put a hand to her head.
“This,” she said faintly. “If that letter hadn’t been stolen, it wouldn’t ’ve gone.”
“Pat!”
The girl nodded.
“I hadn’t the heart to destroy it: but I’d locked it away and thrown the key into the garden, because—I was so anxious . . . to play the game.”
Six months had gone by, and Simon Beaulieu had earned three hundred pounds.
The little flat at Chartres was becoming a luxurious apartment. Now that the tiles were down, the tiny bathroom alone was a flashing chapel of ease. . . .