Leah made a ball out of the torn handkerchief and tossed it gaily in the air. "That will do for lawyers' costs," said she, airily, "though I hope the bill won't be so extortionate. Thirty thousand pounds!" She sprang up, with dithyrambic utterance, scarcely refraining from a war-dance. "Thirty thousand golden sovereigns! Six thousand lovely, lovely Bank of England notes! Oh, Vanderbilt! Oh----" The sight of her relative's disgusted face curbed her ecstasy: "You think that my exultation over this money is vulgar."
"Heartless, at least, since it is the price of your husband's death. To you, apparently, Jim is more valuable dead than alive."
"I entirely agree with you," confessed Leah, candidly; then added with impatient anger, "Do you expect me to tell you lies?"
"You might show some grief."
"Heavens! What else have I been doing for the past three weeks?"
"Assuming a virtue which you have not."
"That remark is too clever to be original, my dear man. How impossible you are! I wear mourning and cry at the right time, and say things I don't believe about Jim to his father and the rest of them; while to you, who blame me for behaving decently outside, I speak as I feel, only to be condemned. What do you expect?"
"To see you exhibit some real grief," said Lionel, who was really angered by her callous behaviour. "You show more genuine emotion over this miserable money than over poor Jim."
"Poor Jim," she mocked scornfully; "are you going to cry up his virtues?"
"He was not so bad as you make him out to be," retorted Lionel, doggedly.