“Which I found there at your desk a moment ago, and thought best, in your interest, to rescue from accident or neglect; even though it be, save for the single stroke of a name begun,” he wound up with his look like a playing searchlight, “unhappily unsigned.”
“Unsigned?”—the exhibition of her design, of her defeat, kept shaking her. “Then it isn’t good—?”
“It’s a Barmecide feast, my dear!”—he had still, her kind friend, his note of grimness and also his penetration of eye. “But who is it writes you colossal cheques?”
“And then leaves them lying about?” Her case was so bad that you would have seen how she felt she must do something—something quite splendid. She recovered herself, she faced the situation with all her bright bravery of expression and aspect; conscious, you might have guessed, that she had never more strikingly embodied, on such lines, the elegant, the beautiful and the true. “Why, who can it have been but poor Breckenridge too?”
“‘Breckenridge’—?” Lord Theign had his smart echoes. “What in the world does he owe you money for?”
It took her but an instant more—she performed the great repudiation quite as she might be prepared to sweep, in the Presence impending, her grandest curtsey. “Not, you sweet suspicious thing, for my great-grandmother!” And then as his glare didn’t fade: “Bender makes my life a burden—for the love of my precious Lawrence.”
“Which you’re weakly letting him grab?”—nothing could have been finer with this than Lord Theign’s reprobation unless it had been his surprise.
She shook her head as in bland compassion for such an idea. “It isn’t a payment, you goose—it’s a bribe! I’ve withstood him, these trying weeks, as a rock the tempest; but he wrote that and left it there, the fiend, to tempt me—to corrupt me!”
“Without putting his name?”—her companion again turned over the cheque.
She bethought herself, clearly with all her genius, as to this anomaly, and the light of reality broke. “He must have been interrupted in the artful act—he sprang up with such a bound at Mr. Crimble’s news. At once then—for his interest in it—he hurried off, leaving the cheque forgotten and unfinished.” She smiled more intensely, her eyes attached, as from fascination, to the morsel of paper still handled by her friend. “But of course on his next visit he’ll add his great signature.”