“But in any circumstances I don’t want him.”
“No; I can quite believe that you could do better. Still, it doesn’t matter, as he won’t come, Mrs Bellmark; not for half-a-crown a day, believe me. But the thought will tend to make Mr Irons less restive also. Lastly, will you persuade your husband not to decline his firm’s offer until Monday?”
“Very well, Mr Carrados,” she said, after a moment’s consideration. “You are Uncle Louis’s friend and therefore our friend. I will do what you ask.”
“Thank you,” said Carrados. “I shall endeavour not to disappoint you.”
“I shall not be disappointed because I have not dared to hope. And I have nothing to expect because I am still completely in the dark.”
“I have been there for nearly twenty years, Mrs Bellmark.”
“Oh, I am sorry!” she cried impulsively.
“So am I—occasionally,” he replied. “Good-bye, Mrs Bellmark. You will hear from me shortly, I hope. About the hawthorn, you know.”
It was, indeed, in something less than forty-eight hours that she heard from him again. When Bellmark returned to his toy villa early on Saturday afternoon Elsie met him almost at the gate with a telegram in her hand.
“I really think, Roy, that everyone we have to do with here goes mad,” she exclaimed, in tragi-humorous despair. “First it was Mr Johns or Jones—if he is Johns or Jones—and then Irons who wanted to work here for half of what he could get at heaps of places about, and now just look at this wire that came from Mr Carrados half-an-hour ago.”