“Yes, very.”
“It’s natural, at your age. I’d like to give you pretty things, Elsie, but you mustn’t be such a little prude.”
“Mother always told me that one shouldn’t take a present—not a valuable present—from a man, without he was a relation or—or else——” She stopped.
“Or else what?”
“He’d asked one to marry him,” half whispered Elsie.
Williams recoiled so unmistakably that for a sickening instant she was afraid of having gone too far.
Genuine tears ran down her face, and she did not know what to say.
“Don’t cry,” said the solicitor dryly. “I’d like you to keep the brooch, and you can thank me in your own time, and your own way.”
“Oh, how good you are!”
She was relieved that he said no more to her that day.