"'Silver' mines?"
"Gold mines. Ah, here he comes now! And not a word, remember, of the news you've brought me!"
"All right, my dear."
"And as for the furnishings of Berkeley Hill; sit tight and don't argue. Daniel always comes round to my way in the end, but it takes a bit of time and diplomacy."
"Poor Daniel, he's like the rest of us, henpecked lot that we are!" Walter teased her. "He comes round to your way because he's got to; no escape! But if I know your Pennsylvania Dutch Daniel, Margaret, and his letters to me have been very self-revealing, he wishes sometimes that the good old wife-beating days were with us yet!"
"No, Daniel isn't like that; he isn't a bit brutal—at least in the sense of rough. He's very gentle, really."
Daniel, now knowing his brother-in-law to be an impecunious and, by Leitzel standards, rather an incapable, unimportant sort of a man, manifested in his curt greeting of him the small esteem he felt for him.
But he found, during his noon hour of respite, that his repeated efforts to talk business with this discounted individual were very skilfully parried.
"We have a pretty big bill, Eastman, against that South Carolina estate," he began over his soup. "A whole year's rent, you know, for Margaret's half of the house, land, and furniture. But Margaret is willing to waive that, in fact, quite willing, and I concur in her willingness. We shan't press that. We'll let that go, especially now that you've come to settle up. If you'd waited much longer, we might not have been so willing to waive the year's rent. Eh, Margaret?"
"Please, Daniel!" Margaret murmured, hot with shame as she saw Walter's crimson embarrassment and rising anger.