"I have twenty thousand pounds," she said.
"Earned by your voice?" he asked, kindly.
"Every penny of it."
"Well, I wouldn't waste it on Blantyre, if I were you. No, by Heaven, you shall not do it, even if it can be done! It is too horrible."
"I owe it to myself to do it. After all, he is still my husband. I have let it be so; and while it is so, and while"—her eyes looked away, her face suffused slightly, her lips tightened—"while things are as they are, I am bound—bound by something, I don't know what, but it is not love, and it is not friendship—to come to his rescue. There will be legal expenses—"
Byng frowned. "Yes, but the others wouldn't see him in a hole—yet I'm not sure, either, Blantyre being Blantyre. In any case, I'm ready to do anything you wish."
She smiled gratefully. "Did you ever know any one to do a favor who wasn't asked to repeat it—paying one debt by contracting another, finding a creditor who will trust, and trading on his trust? Yet I'd rather owe you two debts than most men one." She held out her hand to him. "Well, it doesn't do to mope—'The merry heart goes all the day, the sad one tires in a mile-a.' And I am out for all day. Please wish me a happy new year."
He took her hand in both of his. "I wish you to go through this year as you ended the last—in a blaze of glory."
"Yes, really a blaze if not of glory," she said, with bright tears, yet laughing, too, a big warm humour shining in her strong face with the dark brown eyes and the thick, heavy eyebrows under a low, broad forehead like his own. They were indeed strangely alike in many ways both of mind and body.
"They say we end the year as we begin it," he said, cheerily. "You proved to Destiny that you were entitled to all she could give in the old year, and you shall have the best that's to be had in 1897. You are a woman in a million, and—"