"You could be chairman—with a veto."
He shook his head. "The rain is dripping through your umbrella. Don't you think we might run to the house?"
"It's only an old hat." It was fresh from Paris, broad-brimmed, beautiful, and bewitching. "Why don't you find"—she smiled nervously—"a millionaire of means?"
"And what would be his reward?"
"Just Virtue's. Won't you be a light to England? And isn't it the duty of parishes and millionaires to supply light?" She was plucking a fern-leaf to pieces.
"Millionaires' minds don't run that way."
"Not male millionaires, perhaps," she said, turning her face from him so jerkily that she shook the oak-shrub and it became a shower-bath.
He looked at her, slightly startled. It was the first emotion she had ever provoked in him, and her heart beat faster.
"I really do think it is giving over now," he said, gazing at her sopping hat.
'Twas as if he had shaken the shrub again and drenched her with cold water. He was mocking her, her and her dollars and her love.