“Nonsense, my dear. I wonder what your father would say if he heard you talk like that.”
“He's got nothing to do with it.”
“Not when he's worth thousands, Missy?”
“Not when he's thousands of miles away, Mr. Teesdale.”
Mr. Teesdale raised his wrinkled forehead and drove on. A look of mingled anxiety and pain aged him years in a minute. Soon the country roads were left behind, and the houses began closing up on either side of a very long and broad high road. It was ten minutes to seven by Mr. Teesdale's watch when he looked at it again. It was time for him to say the difficult thing which had occurred to him two or three miles back, and he said it in the gentlest tones imaginable from an old man of nearly seventy.
“Missy, my dear, is it possible” (so he put it) “that you have run short of the needful?”
“It's a fact,” said Missy light-heartedly.
“But how, my dear, have you managed to do that?”
“How? Let's see. I gave a lot away—to a woman in the steerage—whose husband went and died at sea. He died of dropsy. I nursed him, I did. Rather! I helped lay him out when he was dead. But don't go telling anybody—please.”
Mr. Teesdale had shuddered uncontrollably; now, however, he shifted the reins to his right hand in order to pat Missy with his left.