"So, my young friend, you're a warm man, Travers Nugent tells me. Lucky chap, to possess inherited wealth, though I'm not sure that I wouldn't have preferred you to have made a pile by hard work, as I have."
Leslie suddenly finding himself on the edge of a precipice, clutched for the only available support—a deprecating and rather shamefaced laugh. "Mr. Nugent must be given to exaggeration, sir," he said. "I have never represented myself as a rich man. As a matter of fact I am—not by any means what you would consider rich."
He thought grimly of the few £5 notes left to him out of the sum advanced by Nugent for current expenses during the bogus courtship of the girl now dearer to him than life. Something of the rueful irony in his mind must have been reflected in his face, for Mr. Maynard, after a sidelong glance at him and a sip of port, continued—
"Now, my lad, I've been and set your back up by hinting that you didn't earn your money. At any rate, you must be pretty well lined to be able to chuck the army at your age, and to possess such a steam yacht as Nugent has described to me."
"I am afraid, sir, that Nugent's imagination has run away with him," Leslie replied, flushing hotly. "The yacht at Weymouth, in which I had been going to travel, is not my own property."
"You have abandoned your intention?"
"Entirely."
A constrained silence fell upon the two men. The blue smoke of their cigars floated over the array of decanters, the luscious fruits and glittering plate. On one the demon of distrust had been unchained; on the other, a cloud of apprehension, threatening the short-lived bliss of the last few days, had swooped from an azure sky. It was Montague Maynard who broke the spell, going, as was his way, direct to the point.
"Look here, Chermside," he blurted out. "I like you, and so does old Sally Dymmock—'cute observers, both of us. But there's something not quite above-board—I don't say about you, but about your circumstances. I'm the last man to judge anybody hastily, and you may have the best of reasons for reticence; but I just want to warn you that if you come to me with a proposal which I need not define I shall expect perfect frankness."
Leslie's heart sank within him, for perfect frankness was what he would never be able to accord. How was he to explain the fact that he was a penniless man without prospects, in face of the impression which, if not actually inspired by him, he allowed to remain, that he was rolling in money? Still less could he explain the motive which had prompted him to acquiescence in Nugent's description of him. And the only alternative to explanation was once for all to abandon hopes of Violet, and to bear his loss as manfully as he could, accepting it as a punishment for his contemplated evil-doing.