Elsa picked up her tray and hastened from the room, feeling that do as she would, she and Mr. Wycherly were doomed to be fellow-conspirators.
The sun came out and shone on the five sovereigns lying on the writing-table, and Montagu, at that moment coming in to his lessons, spied them.
"What a lot of money!" he exclaimed. "What are you going to do with it?"
"I hope," said Mr. Wycherly, quite gaily, "that I am going to buy large pieces of happiness with it."
"Can you buy happiness?" Montagu asked wonderingly, ever desirous to search out any doubt.
"No," Mr. Wycherly said decidedly, "not the best kinds, but it sometimes happens that one can buy useful things that help—to a certain degree—in obtaining happiness: and it is those useful things I hope to buy."
"Useful things," Montagu repeated in a disappointed tone, "like pinafores? Those sort of things wouldn't make me happy." Montagu loathed the blue pinafores enforced by Miss Esperance, and considered it a degradation to wear one.
"I'm not sure that I shall buy pinafores," said Mr. Wycherly; "they are not the only useful things in the world."
"Useful things are always dull," Montagu persisted.
"On the contrary," Mr. Wycherly replied, "useful things are sometimes full of the most exquisite romance."