"Nothing worrying you?"
"Nothing much."
And again--vaguely--the solicitor in Wilberforce grew nervous.
"Damn it all," he thought, "supposing my suspicions are right. Suppose those two have gone off together. It's fifty to one against, but still----"
The instinct to gamble on that fifty-to-one chance (it had been a hundred to one half an hour since), to propose and have done with it, came to him. But his caution subdued the instinct. The world, his world, was a pretty censorious place; and if one's father were almost a cert. for his baronetcy, if one were junior partner in a firm so entirely sans reproche with the king's proctor as Wilberforce, Wilberforce & Cartwright--well, one just couldn't afford to take even thousand-to-one gambles on one's future wife's social position.
The entrance of Betty, a thin golden-haired grass-widow, very much à la mode from her trim feet to her modulated voice, tided over the awkward interview.
That night, however, Mollie Fullerford--least sentimental of the modern young--cried herself to sleep.
3
Tears are not fashionable in Pump Court; but that melancholy individual, Benjamin Bunce, very nearly followed Mollie Fullerford's example, when "young Mr. Wilberforce"--anxious only to allay his suspicions--called at Ronnie's chambers next morning.
"I'm sure I don't know what to do, sir," wailed Benjamin. "Here's a couple of good briefs come in; and my instructions is not to send anything on to him. No, sir, I'm afraid I can't give you his address. I'm not allowed to give any one his address--except Mr. David Patterson. And that only if Mr. David Patterson asks me for it."