“Never you mind! And don’t lisp a word to her, or to Eddy or to any one else. If it comes off, it’ll be a beano for the lot of us.”
“Right you are,” he assented, with a glimmer of animation. “But say, you won’t forget about the Hoskins bet, will you? If I could even have a third of it! I could do with some odd sovereigns just now, and no mistake.”
“Sh-h! Here he comes. You run away-now, d’ye see; I want to talk with Eddy.”
Captain Edward emerged from the haze of cigarette smoke which veiled the throng within the manager’s room. “Well?” he demanded, with a kind of sulky eagerness.
“I haven’t told him you were here,” Cora began, under her breath, drawing her husband aside down the passage. “It didn’t seem to come into the talk. He thinks I’m here with Tom.”
Edward looked down upon his wife, with a slow, ponderous glance of mingled hope and uneasiness. He pulled at his small yellow mustache, and aimlessly jingled some keys in his pocket.
“You’ve had nearly two hours with him, you know,” he protested, doubtfully.
“Don’t I know it!” she ejaculated, holding up her hands in mock pain at the retrospect. “Good God! If I had a thousand pounds to show for it, I’d say it was the hardest earned money I ever handled.”
“Yes, but you haven’t got anything to show—so far’s I can make out,” he commented with gloom. “You didn’t mention my name at all, eh? But that was what you particularly set out to do, I thought.”
“Well, you thought wrong,” she responded briskly. “I set out to do what was wisest under the circumstances, and I’ve done it. I’ve got an inkling of a game to be played”—she let her eyes twinkle at him as she made this tantalizing little pause—“a game, you old goose, worth seven hundred thousand times anything you ever thought of.”