“No, no,” he stretched out an opened hand and with it made a down-pressing gesture that was full of command. “Don’t move yet. These are just suggestions of mine, suggestions I was making for your good. Of course, if you don’t care to follow them, it’s your affair, not mine. I’ve done my duty, and, after all, that’s what concerns me most. What I asked you to come here for to-day was to talk about this matter, to talk further, to thresh it out some more. I’ve seen Mrs. Ryan since our last meeting.”
He paused, and Berny sat upright, her eyes on him in a fixity of listening that was almost a glare. She was tremulously anxious and yet afraid to hear the coming words.
“What did she say?” she asked with the same irritation she had shown before.
“She doubles her offer to you. She’ll give you two hundred thousand dollars to leave her son.”
“Well, I won’t,” said Berny, drawing herself to the edge of the chair. “She can keep her two hundred thousand dollars.”
“That two hundred thousand dollars, well invested, would give an income of from twelve to fifteen thousand a year. On that, in Paris, you’d be a rich woman.”
“I guess I’ll stay a poor one in San Francisco.”
He eyed her ponderingly over the hand that stroked his beard.
“I wonder,” he said slowly, “what’s making you act like this? You stump me. Here you are, poor, treated like dirt, ostracized as if you were a leper, with the most powerful family in California your open enemy, and you won’t take a fortune that’s offered you without a condition, and go to a place where you’d be honored and courted and could make yourself anything you’d like. I can’t make it out. You beat me.”
Berny was flattered. Even through the almost sickening sense of longing that the thought of the lost two hundred thousand dollars created in her, she was conscious of the gratified conceit of the woman who is successfully mysterious.