“I wonder will young Mr. Wingfield find that out for himself?”
Mr. Wadhurst looked up from his plate with a very grim smile.
“He’s not the sort to find things out for himself—he has no head, I tell you,” he replied. “Ducks and drakes—that’s the sort of game that will be played by the young ass until every penny’s gone.”
“It’s a pretty large poultry bill that will absorb twelve thousand a year, to say nothing of the accumulations,” said Priscilla.
“Poultry bill? Pheasants, do you mean?” he said.
“Ducks and drakes—that was what you mentioned,” said she.
He shook his head in reproof of his daughter’s levity.
“When a young spendthrift makes spending the business of his life you may trust him to run through a million in a month. I wonder if he’ll ever find out about the pheasants. Dunning did pretty well out of the pheasants.”
“Perhaps he put down all that he made by them—put it down to the credit side of the estate,” she suggested; and again he smiled that grim smile of his—the smile of the shrewd man who is conscious of his own shrewdness.
“If he was doing that he wouldn’t have taken the trouble to bind Jenkins over to secrecy,” said the farmer.