“As you know the place and met my sister, you may enjoy reading it. Julia’s unusually communicative. It almost seems as if I were a person of some consequence to them now.”
Ida took the letter, and her face hardened as she read. Then she looked at him with a suggestive straightening of her brows.
“Isn’t that only natural? You have found a mine,” she said.
“The same idea occurred to me,” laughed Weston; “but, after all, perhaps I shouldn’t have shown you the letter. It wasn’t quite the thing.”
“Still, you felt just a little hurt, and that I could respect a confidence?”
Ida looked at him as if she expected an answer, and it occurred to Weston that she was very alluring in her long white dress, though the same thought had been uppermost in his mind for the last half-hour.
“Yes,” he admitted, “I suppose that was it.”
He could have answered more explicitly, but he felt that it would not be safe, for it seemed very probable that if he once gave his feelings rein they would run away with him; and this attitude, as the girl naturally had noticed on other occasions, tended to make their conversation somewhat difficult.
“What are you going to do about one very tactfully-worded suggestion?” she asked.
“You mean the hint that I should make a few shares in the Grenfell Consolidated over to my English relatives? After all, considering everything, it’s not an unnatural request. I shall endeavor to fall in with it.”