The ex-hussar regarded her fixedly, the while he pondered her words. “I don’t think I’m very keen about games,” he remarked at last, with obvious suspicion in his tone. “A married woman always gets the worst of games, in the long run.”
She grinned affectionate contempt up at him. “Don’t be such a duffer, Eddy!” she remonstrated with him. “If I had a notion of that sort—do you suppose I’d come and give it away to you? What rot you talk!”
“Yes—but what is your game?” he demanded, doggedly.
“I won’t tell you!” She spoke with great apparent decision. “You’d blab it all over the place. You can no more keep a secret than you can keep a ten-pound note.”
“Oh, I say, Cora,” he urged, in grieved protestation. “You know I’m a regular bailey oyster, where a thing has to be kept dark. You’d better tell me, you know. It’ll keep me from—imaginin’ things.”
The wife smiled. “It’s only a plant I’ve got in my mind,” she explained, after consideration. “What’s the matter with my naming a wife for him, eh?”
Edward, upon reflection, pouted his lips. “Probably you’d come a cropper over it, in the first place,” he objected, slowly, “and then even if you did name the winner, she’d probably welsh us out of our winnings—and besides, what do we want of his marrying at all. The longer he puts off getting married, the less the odds against us gets. I should think even a woman could see that.”
Cora permitted herself a frank yawn. “I’ll explain it to you to-morrow,” she said.
“And now I must go back to my Juggins for a few minutes. I’ll come and fetch you when I’m ready to go.”
“I don’t fancy it much, you know,” he urged upon her as she turned. He took a step toward her, and put his hand on her arm. “If your brother Tom was any good”—he began, with a hard growl in his voice—“by God, I’d have half a mind to talk with him about my plan. Old Pirie’d be no use—but if Tom had the sense and the nerve—why, we’d—”