Latham did, and she continued, half chatting to him, half musing: “My! how it all comes back, talking about it. Well, he left us all that money, left it to me as much as if he’d said so, and very much more than he left it to John. That’s another way we have in America that you couldn’t understand if you tried; so I wouldn’t try, if I were you.”
“I won’t,” her guest said meekly. “Go on, please. I am interested.”
“Well, Uncle Ira died, and I made John retire.”
“Retire?”
“Give up the bar. And we traveled. I love to travel, I always have. And now we could afford to go anywhere and do everything. Of course I’d always had money, heaps and heaps. Papa was rich, and he left me everything. Oh! Richard Bransby wasn’t the only pebble on that beach. Gracious! we run to such fathers in America. But, of course, we’d had to live on John’s money.”
“Why?”
“Why?” she blazed at him. “Why? Why, because my money wasn’t his. He hadn’t earned it. John Hilary never had so much as a cigar out of my money. He dressed shockingly. I had to burn half the ties he bought. And his hats! But he supported me, I didn’t support him. American men don’t sponge on their wives. They wouldn’t do it. And if they would, we wouldn’t let them—not we American women. I say, Dr. Latham, you’ve a lot to learn about America—all Englishmen have.”
“Go on. Teach me some more. I like learning.”
“There’s not much more to tell. We were not together long, John and I. It was like a story my father used to tease me with, when he was tired and I teased him to tell me stories. ‘I’ll tell you a story about Jack A’Manory, and now my story’s begun. I’ll tell you another about Jack and his brother, and now my story’s done.’ I was eighteen, nearly, when I was married. It was four years after that that John said good-by to his murderers and absconders. Just a year after he died in Hong Kong—cholera. That teased me some.” The pretty lips were quivering and Latham saw a tear pearl on the long lashes.
After a pause he said gently, “Will you ever give any one else his place, do you think?”