"Oh!—ah!—just so!" replied Christopher, starting as from a pensive reverie. "Ah, to be sure. Now, what would you say, Mr. Mallalieu? How do you feel disposed, sir?"
Mallalieu looked fixedly from aunt to nephew, from nephew to aunt. Then his face became hard and rigid.
"Fifty pound apiece!" he said. "That's how I'm disposed. And you don't get an offer like that every day, I know. Fifty pound apiece!"
Miss Pett inclined her turbaned head towards her right shoulder and sighed heavily: Mr. Pett folded his hands, looked at the ceiling, and whistled.
"We don't get an offer like that every day!" he murmured. "No!—I should think we didn't! Fifty pound apiece!—a hundred pound altogether—for saving a fellow-creature from the gallows! Oh, Mr. Mallalieu!"
"Hang it!—how much money d'ye think I'm likely to carry on me?—me!—in my unfortunate position!" snarled Mallalieu. "D'ye think——"
"Christopher," observed Miss Pett, rising and making for the door, "I should suggest that Mr. Mallalieu is left to consider matters. Perhaps when he's reflected a bit——"
She and her nephew went out, leaving Mallalieu fuming and grumbling. And once in the living-room she turned to Christopher with a shake of the head.
"What did I tell you?" she said. "Mean as a miser! My plan's much the best. We'll help ourselves—and then we can snap our fingers at him. I'll give him an extra strong nightcap tonight, and then...."
But before the close of that evening came Mallalieu's notions underwent a change. He spent the afternoon in thinking. He knew that he was in the power of two people who, if they could, would skin him. And the more he thought, the more he began to be suspicious—and suddenly he wondered why he slept so heavily at night, and all of a sudden he saw the reason. Drugged!—that old she-devil was drugging his drink. That was it, of course—but it had been for the last time: she shouldn't do it again.