She turned her head and looked at him.
"My father," she said, "declines to ask you any questions. He would consider it in bad taste to suggest for a moment that he felt any uneasiness with regard to the necessary payment for them. He is none the less, however, worried. He was foolish enough to tell his lawyers about them, and lawyers, I am afraid, have very little faith in him as a business man. The result of the enquiries they made was most depressing."
"It probably would be," David assented.
"Forty thousand pounds' worth of shares," Letitia continued, "which are worth as much now as when my father bought them, are, I suppose, nothing to you. I wondered whether you would object to have them back again? I think that it would relieve my father's mind."
Thain was silent for a moment. He had lit a cigar now and was smoking steadily.
"You have not much idea of business, Lady Letitia," he remarked.
"Business?" she repeated, with a note of surprise in her tone. "How should I have? There are certain matters of common sense and of honour which I suppose are common to every one of reasonable intelligence. There did not seem to me to be any principle of business involved in this."
"Supposing," David said, "the shares had risen and were worth two dollars to-day, you would not in that case, I presume, have honoured me with this visit?"
"Certainly not," she replied.
"I did not sell those shares to your father as an act of philanthropy," he continued. "He asked me to show him a speculation, and I showed him this. Those shares, so far as I know, are as likely to be worth five times their value next week, or nothing at all. I am a very large holder, and it seemed to me that it would be a reasonable act of prudence to sell a few of them at a price which showed me a small margin of profit."