‘It doesn’t seem to me,’ said Tarrant slowly, ‘a downright impossibility. It might be managed, with the help of your friend Mary, and granting that you yourself have the courage. But’—he made a large gesture—‘of course I can’t exact any such thing of you. It must seem practicable to you yourself.’
‘What are we to do if my money is lost?’
‘Don’t say we.’ He smiled generously, perhaps too generously. ‘A man must support his wife. I shall arrange it somehow, of course, so that you have no anxiety. But—’
His voice dropped.
‘Lionel!’ She sprang up and approached him as he stood by the fireplace. ‘You won’t leave me, dear? How can you think of going so far away—for months—and leaving me as I am now? Oh, you won’t leave me!’
He arched his eyebrows, and smiled gently.
‘If that’s how you look at it—well, I must stay.’
‘You can do something here,’ Nancy continued, with rapid pleading. ‘You can write for the papers. You always said you could—yes, you did say so. We don’t need very much to live upon—at first. I shall be content—’
‘A moment. You mean that the money must be abandoned.’
She had meant it, but under his look her confused thoughts took a new direction.