“Not that—not that at all; but she may have stretched what I said to mean that.”
Well, sir, I just laid into that fellow when I heard that, though I could see that he didn’t think it was refined of me. He’d never made it any secret that he thought me a pretty coarse old man, and his face showed me now that I was jarring his delicate works.
“I suppose I have been indiscreet,” he said, “but I must say I expected something different from you, after coming out this way and owning up. Of course, if you don’t care to help me——”
I cut him short there. “I’ve got to help you. But I want you to tell me the truth. How have you managed to keep this Curzon girl from announcing her engagement to you?”
“Well,” and there was a scared grin on Jack’s face now; “I told her that you, as trustee under father’s will, had certain unpleasant powers over my money—in fact, that most of it would revert to Sis if I married against your wishes, and that you disliked her, and that she must work herself into your good graces before we could think of announcing our engagement.”
I saw right off that he had told Mabel Moore the same thing, and that was why those two girls had been so blamed polite to me the night before. So I rounded on him sudden.
“You’re engaged to that Miss Moore, too, aren’t you?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Why didn’t you come out like a man and say so at first?”
“I couldn’t, Mr. Graham. Someways it seemed like piling it up so, and you take such a cold-blooded, unsympathetic view of these things.”