‘There,’ she said, holding out a scrawled sheet toward her uncle. ‘There is a cablegram. Please see that it is sent immediately.’
Copley ran his eyes over it in silence, and his mouth twitched involuntarily into a smile.
‘Well, Marcia, I’ll see that it goes. I don’t know—it may do some good, after all.’ He paused awkwardly a moment and held out his hand. ‘Am I forgiven?’ he asked. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything against your father; but he’s my brother, remember, and while I abuse him myself I wouldn’t let an outsider do it. You are right; he doesn’t know what he is doing. You must forget what I said. I have thought about it too much. Every one in Italy believes that I have an interest in the deal; and when I am doing my best to help things along, it is a little hard, you know, to be accused—by the very people I am giving to—of being the cause of their distress.’
‘Yes, Uncle Howard, I understand; I don’t blame you,’ she returned, with a note of weariness in her voice; ‘but—papa is really the kindest man in the world.’
‘Ah, Marcia, a very kind-hearted man nowadays can do a great deal of harm by telegraph without having to witness the results.’
Sybert crossed the room toward her with a curious deep look in his eyes. He half held out his hand, but Marcia turned away without appearing to notice, and picking up her uncle’s cheque-book from the table, she tore out a leaf and scrawled across the face.
‘There’s some money for the Relief Committee,’ she said, as she tossed the slip of paper across the table toward him. ‘That’s all I have in the bank just at present, but I will give some more as soon as I get it.’
Sybert’s face was equally impassive as he glanced from the paper back to her.
‘Thirteen thousand lire is a good deal. Do you think you ought——’
‘I do as I please with my own money—this is my own,’ she added in parenthesis. ‘My mother left it to me.’