‘Won’t be bad, when we get the decks cleared,’ he remarked to Beatrice. ‘Plenty of room to make twenty thousand a year or so.’
He checked himself, and asked in a subdued voice, ‘Seen anything of the Lords?’
Beatrice nodded with a smile. ‘And heard about the will. Have you?’
‘No, I haven’t. Come into this little room.’
He closed the door behind them, and looked at his companion with curiosity, but without show of eagerness.
‘Well, it’s a joke,’ said Miss. French.
‘Is it? How?’
‘Fanny’s that mad about it! She’d got it into her silly noddle that Horace Lord would drop in for a fortune at once. As it is, he gets nothing at all for two years, except what the Barmbys choose to give him. And if he marries before he’s four-and-twenty, he loses everything—every cent!’
Crewe whistled a bar of a street-melody, then burst into laughter.
‘That’s how the old joker has done them, is it? Quite right too. The lad doesn’t know his own mind yet. Let Fanny wait if she really wants him—and if she can keep hold of him. But what are the figures?’