"About fifteen bob a minute, so they tell me."
"After a pound a week in the bush!"
"It does sound rummy, doesn't it? After you with the match, sir."
"It's incredible."
"Yet it's astonishing how used you get to it in time—you'd be surprised! At first the whole thing knocked me sideways; it was tucker I couldn't digest. But once you take to the soft tack, there's nothing like it in the world. You may guess who's made me take to it quicker than I might have done!"
Dalrymple shrugged his massive shoulders, and raised a contemplative eye to the moon, that lay curled like a silver shaving in the lucid heavens.
"Oh, yes, I can guess," he said sardonically. "And mind you I've nothing against the girl—I meant you were lucky there. The girl's all right—if you must marry. I don't dislike a woman who'll show fight; and she looked like showing it when I tried on that cracker-night-cap thing of yours. Oh, certainly! If you were to marry, you couldn't have done better; the girl's worth fifty of her mother, at any rate."
"Fifty million!" cried Jack, somewhat warmly.
"Fifty million I meant to say," and the squatter ran his arm through that of his host. "Come, don't you mind me, Jack, my boy! You know what an old heathen I am in those little matters; and we have lots of other things to talk about, in any case."
Jack was mollified in a moment.