He faced straight about. “Oh I don’t deny my part.”
He shone at them brightly enough, and Mrs. Brook, thoughtful, wistful, candid, took in for a moment the radiance. “And yet to think that after all it has been mere TALK!”
Something in her tone again made her hearers laugh out; so it was still with the air of good humour that Vanderbank answered: “Mere, mere, mere. But perhaps it’s exactly the ‘mere’ that has made us range so wide.”
Mrs. Brook’s intelligence abounded. “You mean that we haven’t had the excuse of passion?”
Her companions once more gave way to mirth, but “There you are!” Vanderbank said after an instant less sociably. With it too he held out his hand.
“You ARE afraid,” she answered as she gave him her own; on which, as he made no rejoinder, she held him before her. “Do you mean you REALLY don’t know if she gets it?”
“The money, if he DOESN’T go in?”—Mitchy broke almost with an air of responsibility into Vanderbank’s silence. “Ah but, as we said, surely—!”
It was Mitchy’s eyes that Vanderbank met. “Yes, I should suppose she gets it.”
“Perhaps then, as a compensation, she’ll even get MORE—!”
“If I don’t go in? Oh!” said Vanderbank. And he changed colour.