“There was a case of it today,” he said, and then paused.
“Precisely,” put in Miss Madden. “The fact that some Frenchwoman, of whom you had never heard before, was going to lose her marriage portion caught your attention, and on the instant you presented her with $10,000, an exercise of power which happens to be on the generous side—but still entirely unreasoning, and not deserving of any intellectual respect. And here's the point: if it had happened that somebody else chanced to produce an opposite impression upon you, you would have been capable of taking $50,000 away from him with just as light a heart.”
Thorpe's face beamed with repressed amusement. “As a matter of fact it was that kind of case I was going to mention. I wasn't referring to the girl and her marriage portion. A young man came to me today—came into my room all cock-a-whoop, smiling to himself with the notion that he had only to name what he wanted, and I would give it to him—and——”
He stopped abruptly, with a confused little laugh. He had been upon the brink of telling about Lord Plowden's discomfiture, and even now the story itched upon his tongue. It cost him an effort to put the narrative aside, the while he pondered the arguments which had suddenly reared themselves against publicity. When at last he spoke, it was with a glance of conscious magnanimity toward the lady who had consented to be his wife.
“Never mind,” he said, lightly. “There wasn't much to it. The man annoyed me, somehow—and he didn't get what he came for—that's all.”
“But he was entitled to get it?” asked Celia Madden. Thorpe's lips pouted over a reply. “Well—no,” he said, with a kind of reluctance. “He got strictly what he was entitled to—precisely what I had promised him—and he wrung up his nose at that—and then I actually gave him 15,000 pounds he wasn't entitled to at all.”
“I hardly see what it proves, then,” Edith Cressage remarked, and the subject was dropped.
Some two hours later, Thorpe took his departure. It was not until he was getting into the hansom which had been summoned, that it all at once occurred to him that he had not for a moment been alone with his betrothed. Upon reflection, as the cab sped smoothly forward, this seemed odd to him. He decided finally that there was probably some social rule about such things which he didn't understand.
In the drawing-room of the house in Grafton Street which he had quitted, the two ladies sat with faces averted from each other, in constrained silence.