To June’s sheer amazement he was keeping a little matter of twelve hundred a year or so up his sleeve.
“Didn’t know you had a rich aunt,” said June amazedly.
“Not my rich aunt. Your rich uncle.” The odd creature grew tawnier, more girl-like than ever.
June lacking a clue as yet could only frown. “Come again. I don’t get you.” It was not the Miss Babraham idiom, but with her patience giving out and a new strength and sanity in her veins, she was in danger of forgetting, just for a moment, that she was an honoured guest in the most famous Italian garden in Surrey.
Nevertheless in the very height of the eclipse a light shone. One of the advantages of a mind really practical is, that when it turns to financial matters, it works automatically at very high pressure. June’s brow was cleft with the harrow of thought. “Do you mean to say,” she figured slowly out, “that Uncle Si has left you all his property?”
“His lawyers say so.” The voice of William had a slight tremor.
“If his lawyers say so it is so,” said June with imperious finality.
A pause of which a thrush, a blackbird and an entire orchestra of skylarks took great advantage, came upon these inheritors in spite of themselves; and then June pensively remarked, a little in the manner of “Mr. Leopold” asking the Head Cashier what Consols had opened at this morning, “he must have bought some property very lucky.”
Quite simply William stated that such was the fact. “The lawyers say that in 1895 he bought what they call a block in New Cross Street, including Number 46, and that it’s been going up and up ever since, so that now it’s worth about eight times what he gave for it.”
In sheer incredulity June stared at him. She must be living in fairyland. And then the sun flamed out from the merest apology for a cloud which was all the April sky could boast at that moment and there came an answering gleam from the burnished image before her eyes in which they had lately planted a myrtle.