“My dear,” he said, addressing his wife, “let me present to you some friends of mine who once rendered me a very great service—somewhat inadvertently it is true”—(a faint shiver shook the three)—“but nevertheless a genuine service. They helped me to win what I wanted most on earth,” and his eyes rested fondly on his wife.
Mrs. Gaskell commented to her husband afterward on the strange, shy modesty which almost prevented the three gentlemen from meeting her gaze, and his smiling reply was, “They couldn’t stand the battery, dear.”
After the three friends had escaped into the street from the (to them) terrible situation, Oswald, probably for the first time in his life, wore a crestfallen air. “Boys,” he said, “he carries too many guns for us all round. Just think of it, he has never even mentioned to her the—to put it mildly—somewhat peculiar part we took in the mining deal.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you can always tell by the expression in a woman’s eyes, when you are presented to her, how her husband has been in the habit of speaking about you to her. I would rather have faced a hair-trigger revolver than those great gray eyes if she had known our game.”
Mr. Gaskell has taken other ninety-day options since his marriage, and some of them have proved very valuable, but he never expects to find one to equal that marvellous pair by which he won both fortune and bride in 1888.