She walked to the window and stood looking out, and he thought she was crying.
"Don't, Mother, please don't," he exclaimed. "It's quite all right. I shall have the money next week, and the brute's just got to wait, that's all."
But she was not crying, and that was not why she had turned her face from him. And what she saw, oddly enough, as she looked out into the empty boughs of the elm tree, was the face of old Mrs. Wick, whose picture young Wick carried in his pocket, and had once shown her. "What a happy woman, what a happy woman!" she was saying under her breath. After a pause she turned round.
"I'll not say you're out, Paul, and I won't say you're away. I'll see the man, and I'll tell him you'll pay him next week."
Across his white face flashed the wild impatience of the man who, knowing that there is for his ailment only one remedy and that a desperate one, is offered some homely, perfectly inefficacious substitute.
"Don't be a——" he broke out. But she went downstairs without heeding him.
The man stood in the middle of the drawing-room, looking round at the homely furniture. Being what she was, Mrs. Walbridge had, of course, expected a florid and bediamonded Jew, instead of which the man was a stocky, red-faced, snub-nosed Englishman, who approached to her innocent ideal of a prize-fighter.
"Good morning."
At her voice he whirled round and about awkwardly.
"Sorry to trouble you, m'm, I'm sure," he began, grasping the situation with what to her seemed marvellous quickness. "Young gentleman had better come down hisself."