"Then when she dies, there will be the furniture all round us. And Kezia can go on living with us, imagining that the furniture is hers, until she too departs in peace. We can teach Aunt Sophy how to save money, and show her how to invest it for our benefit. It looks to me as if we'd got the future ready-made."
"Is there anything very serious in all this?" she asked.
"Well, it's not like a bad illness, or any great disaster. It's comfort, happiness, all that sort of thing. When we are in for a jolly good time, we don't regard that as serious."
"But what is to happen on the last day of the month?"
"It has just occurred to me we might do the right thing—obviously the right thing. Don't you think so, Nellie? What's the good of waiting, and wearing ourselves out with ceaseless labour? On the thirty-first of this month, the last of summer, let us make the plunge."
"Do you mean it?" she asked, with a queer little laugh, which was perhaps a trifle spiteful; but then the lover was so very callous.
"I have thought over it a great many times, and I've always arrived at the same conclusion."
"But what do you want me to do on the thirty-first?"
"To go to church."
"I go every Sunday."