“Quite,” she said, looking smilingly in his face.
“Then now for dinner,” he said, leading her to the door.
That evening John Garstang sat over his modest glass of wine alone, fitting together the pieces of his plans, and as he did so he smiled and seemed content.
“No,” he said, softly, “you will not pocket brother Robert’s money, friend James, for I hold the winning trump. What beautiful soft wax it is to mould! Only patience—patience! The fruit is not quite ripe yet. A hundred and fifty thou—a hundred and fifty thou!”
Chapter Thirty One.
“If I could only get poor Pierce to believe in me again!” sighed Jenny, as she lay back in an easy chair at the cottage, after a month of illness; for in addition to the violent sprain from which she had suffered, the exposure had brought on a violent rheumatic cold and fever, from which she was slowly recovering.
“But he doesn’t believe in me a bit now, even after all I’ve suffered. Oh, how I should like to punish that wretched boy before I go!”
She was sitting close to the window, where she could look down the road toward the village, her eyes dull, her face listless, thinking over the past—her favourite way of making herself miserable, as she had no heart attachment, or disappointment, as a mental “pièce de résistance” to feast upon during her illness.