"You must be ingenious; I can't," said Mary. "If people scarcely ever see us together they'll guess we're trying to humbug them."
"But they will see us together. We are together. We've been together—I mean we've seen a lot of each other—all our lives."
"Ah, not that way!"
"Oh, trust me to work it right!" cried the young man, whose imagination had now evidently begun to glow in the air of their pious fraud.
"You'll find it a dreadful bore," said Mary Gosselin.
"Then I'll drop it, don't you see? And you'll drop it, of course, the moment you've had enough," Lord Beaupré punctually added. "But as soon as you begin to realise what a lot of good you do me you won't want to drop it. That is if you're what I take you for!" laughed his lordship.
If a third person had been present at this conversation—and there was nothing in it surely that might not have been spoken before a trusty listener—that person would perhaps have thought, from the immediate expression of Mary Gosselin's face, that she was on the point of exclaiming "You take me for too big a fool!" No such ungracious words in fact however passed her lips; she only said after an instant: "What reason do you propose to give, on the day you need one, for our rupture?"
Her interlocutor stared. "To you, do you mean?"
"I sha'n't ask you for one. I mean to other people."
"Oh, I'll tell them you're sick of me. I'll put everything on you, and you'll put everything on me."