“No, please don’t. It’s a bargain that I am to give the money back to the one what gi’ it to me to keep, and no questions arsked. That’s a bargain, ain’t it, Silas Lynn?”
“To be sure, Jill. You don’t suppose as I doubts yer, my pretty little cuttin’? You come along to the ’ouse, and I’ll get the money out. ’Ow’ll yer take it? In silver or gowld?”
“I’d like five sovereigns best, Silas, ef you had ’em.”
“Well, we’ll see. You set there in the porch, and I’ll go and look.”
Silas presently returned with five new sovereigns, which he placed in Jill’s open palm. It was delightful to him to give. He had no idea that this gold was the price of freedom and of a girl’s first love.
“My word, how still she sets,” he muttered. “Breeding through and through. Wot flower is she most like now? The lavender, I’m thinking—so primily and shut-up like in its ways. She’ll make a wife in a thousand. I’m ’bout the luckiest feller in Christendom.”
Chapter Twelve.
Quite early in the afternoon Jill returned to the humble little flat in Howard’s Buildings. She had felt nervous and excited until she got there. Nat might be waiting for her. Nat might have come and discovered her not there and gone away again, and the first suspicion of cold doubt might already have reached him. But when Jill discovered that Nat Carter had not yet arrived; when she questioned Mr Stanley, who assured her emphatically that that handsome young man, her sweet-heart, had not put in an appearance, she suddenly felt a strange quiet and almost apathy stealing over her.