“Oh, no! oh, no!” she whispered ecstatically; “it’s too much, it’s too much!”
“Well, I don’t know about being too much,” said Bayre, reflectively. “I shouldn’t like to write many novels on the same terms if I had nothing else to live by. Of course, they say it’s immature and crude, and the work of a beginner: those are the excuses they make for offering you only ten pounds for it. But poor as the pay is, I should advise you to take it; it’s a beginning, you know.”
“Take it!” cried Olwen, incredulously. “You think it necessary to advise me to take it? Why, why, it’s magnificent, colossal! Didn’t Milton only get five pounds for Paradise Lost?”
“Ah, but that was poetry, and Milton was different,” said Bayre.
She laughed joyously.
“Oh, Mr Bayre, I can never thank you enough. You’ve given me more happiness than anybody else has ever done in all my life.”
He made a rush for the opportunity, but before he could more than open his lips she checked him by an abrupt turn in the conversation.
“Isn’t it dreadful about poor Mrs Bayre? That she should be left without a penny?”
“Well, she ran away, you know.”
“Well, but he did everything to prove that he wanted her to. I’ve heard a great deal about it, and I know that life was made unendurable to her here. It seems a dreadful thing that he should have died without forgiving her, or making any provision for her.”