“It is sad to look so far away,” said she, taking as comfortable a position as she could upon the cushions. “Life was so jolly then. Oh! a good old day’s trout-fishing is worth all the money in the world. Money is no use; what’s the good of it? It just makes one not care for the simple pleasures of life. Do you remember the picnic you and I and those American children, who were staying at Callander, had, when the soda-water bottle burst, and we found we’d left everything behind but the jam and the eggs? Dick, I—I—want to ask you something.”
It was one of the peculiarities of Jane’s mind that a question formulating there would work its way along like a worm, under, maybe, ten minutes of conversation, and then come out at the end of a paragraph, rise for air, so to speak, in a manner irrelevant and sometimes startling.
“Yes?”
“What became of you all those three years before you came here to Japan?—you vanished. You told me the other day you were in Australia; were you?”
“I was in prison.”
She turned deathly pale, and stared at him as if he had struck her.
“Oh, you need not be so alarmed; it was not a criminal but a social prison. My father allowed me a hundred and fifty a year, paid quarterly, as long as I lived in Sydney, and as I had no trade and no money I lived in Sydney for three years—tied by the leg.”
“I think you take a pleasure in frightening me; first you told me you were a shopman, now a prisoner. Dick, why do you always make your own case out worse than it really is? Tell me, what was the last quarrel with your father about?”
“Debts.”
“And, Dick—you know you used to—”