IX
THE OLD WIFE
“Yes; married by the 30th of June, introduce my wife to the tenants on Christmas Eve, or no fortune. That was my uncle’s last and worst joke; he was reputed a funny man in his time. The alternatives are pretty ghastly either way.”
“Doesn’t that rather depend?” Sylvia queried, with a swift blue glance from under veiling lashes.
Michael answered her with a look, the male counterpart of her own, from dark Devon eyes, the upper lid arched in a perfect semicircle over pure grey. “Yes; but my wife must have a hundred a year of her own in Consols, to protect me from fortune-hunters—lone, lorn lamb that I am!”
Sylvia emphasised the sigh with which she admitted her indigence. Her pretty eyebrows owned plaintively that she, a struggling artist, had no claim against the nation.
“Mary has just a hundred a year,” she said, her voice low-toned as she looked across the room to where, demure in braided locks and grey camlet, her companion sat knitting.
“I daresay,” Michael answered indifferently, following her eyes’ flight and her tone’s low pitch; “but she’s young. I shall advertise for an elderly housekeeper. And qui vivra verra.”
The words, lightly cast on the thin soil of a foolish word-play with a pretty woman, bore fruit.