"Yes. Because there's another expense I may have to meet. I'm going to ask you a question. Which, in a general way, do you think would cost more to keep—an automobile or—or a—well, a wife?"
"Oh, an automobile!" laughed Margaret.
Daniel grinned broadly as he gazed at her; evidently she suspected the delicate drift of his idea and was advising him for her own advantage. Nothing slow about her!
"Wives are cheap compared to automobiles," she insisted.
"You really think so?" He couldn't manage to keep from his voice a slight note of anxiety. "Living here with your married sister, you are in a position to judge."
Margaret began to wonder whether this man were a humourist or an idiot. But before she could reply, their tête-à-tête, so satisfactory to Mr. Leitzel, was interrupted. Mr. and Mrs. Eastman returned to the library.
Now as the formality of chaperoning was not practised in New Munich, Daniel, with all his "advantages," had never heard of it. When, therefore, the Eastmans settled themselves with the evident intention of remaining in the room, their guest found himself feeling chagrined, not only because he preferred to be alone with Miss Berkeley, but because the conclusion was forced upon him that he must have been mistaken in assuming that they had designedly left him with her after dinner.
This conclusion was confirmed when Miss Berkeley, quite deliberately leaving the obligation of entertaining him to her elders, changed her seat to a little distance from him, and in the conversation that followed took very little part. She even seemed, in the course of a half-hour, rather bored and—Daniel couldn't help seeing it—sleepy. Could it be, he wondered with a sinking heart, that she was already engaged to another man? How else explain this indifference?
But as the evening moved on, and the married pair, in spite of some subtle hints on his part, still sat glued to their chairs, though he could see that they, too, were tired and sleepy, he surmised that their "game" was to hinder Miss Berkeley's marriage!
"They'd like to keep her money in the family for their children, I guess!" he shrewdly concluded.