Grace laughed. "With a very disproportionate emolument—which is a point one has to consider after all. I'm not sure it wouldn't have been better if he had been a prospector."
Ingleby's pulse throbbed a trifle faster. He had no great knowledge of the gentler sex; but he was not a fool, and it seemed to him that the girl had not spoken altogether without a purpose.
"I don't think you really believe that," he said.
"Perhaps I don't," and Grace appeared to reflect. "At least, I suppose I shouldn't have done so once, but, of course, a prospector who has done sufficiently well for himself can take any place that pleases him in Canada."
"Still, you don't think that right."
"It would naturally depend a good deal upon the prospector."
Ingleby sat still, almost too still, in fact, for a moment or two; but he could not hide the little gleam in his eyes. He had, it is true, democratic views, that is, so far as everybody but Grace Coulthurst was concerned; but he was quite willing to admit that she was a being of a very different and much higher order than his own. That added to the attraction she had for him; and now she had suggested that they were, after all, more or less on the same level. It was almost disconcerting. He did not know what to make of it; but while he pondered over it she flashed a quick glance at him.
"I wonder if you know how Tomlinson got away?" she asked.
It was apparently an astonishingly abrupt change of subject, but when Ingleby, who had grown wiser in the meanwhile, afterwards recalled that night, he was less sure that it might not have been, after all, part of an instinctive continuity of policy. He had discovered by then that even very charming and ingenuous women not infrequently have a policy.
"I don't mind admitting that I do—to you," he said.