“And I hardly know why I asked the question. Isn’t it funny? I believe we’re actually trying to make conversation!”
“You are—I’m not,” laughed Katharine. “It was you who began asking. I was talking quite sentimentally and appropriately about yesterday seeming so long ago, you know. But it’s true. It does—it seems ages. I wonder when time will begin again—I feel as though it had stopped suddenly.”
“It will begin again, and it will seem awfully long, before this afternoon—when uncle Robert has refused to have anything to do with us.”
“He won’t refuse—he shan’t refuse!” Katharine spoke with an energy which increased at every syllable. “Now that the thing is done, Jack, just put yourself in his position for a moment. Just imagine that you have anywhere between fifty and a hundred millions, all of your own. Yes—I know. You can’t imagine it. But suppose that you had. And suppose that you had a grand-niece, whom you liked, and who wasn’t altogether a disagreeable young person, and whom you had always rather tried to pet and spoil—not exactly knowing how to do it, but out of sheer good nature. And suppose that you had known ever so long that there was only one thing which could make your nice niece perfectly happy—”
“It’s all very well, Katharine,” interrupted Ralston, “but has he known that?”
“I’ve never failed to tell him so, on the most absurdly inadequate provocation. So it must be his fault if he doesn’t know it—and I shall certainly tell him all over again before I bring out the news. It wouldn’t do to be too sudden, you know. Well, then—suppose all that, and that the young gentleman in question was a proper young gentleman enough, as young gentlemen go, and didn’t want money, and wouldn’t take it if it were offered to him, but merely asked for a good chance to work and show what he could do. That’s all very simple, isn’t it? And then realize—don’t suppose any more—just what’s going to happen inside of half an hour. The devoted niece goes to the good old uncle, and says all that over again, and calmly adds that she’s done the deed and married the young gentleman and got a certificate, which she produces—by the bye, you must give it to me. Don’t be afraid of my losing it—I’m not such a goose. And she goes on to say that unless the good uncle does something for her husband, she will simply make the uncle’s life a perfectly unbearable burden to him, and that she knows how to do it, because if he’s a Lauderdale, she’s a Lauderdale, and her husband is half a Lauderdale, so that it’s all in the family, and no entirely unnecessary consideration is to be shown to the victim—well? Don’t you think that ought to produce an effect of some sort? I do.”
“Yes,” laughed Ralston, “I think so, too. Something is certainly sure to happen.”
END OF VOL. I.