As Ann listened to the stumbling recital, her face paled and grew very grave. This was worse—far worse than she had anticipated.
“How much, do you owe—altogether, Tony?” she asked at last, when he had finished speaking.
“Twelve hundred.”
“Twelve hundred pounds!” The largeness of the amount left her momentarily aghast, and the vague idea she had been harbouring that Robin and she might scrape up a hundred or two between them and so put matters straight crumbled to atoms.
Twelve hundred pounds! In her wildest imaginings she had never dreamed of Tony’s owing such a sum. She shivered a little, partly from nerves, partly from sheer physical cold. The fire had smouldered to black ash long ere this, and the chill air which precedes the dawn was creeping into the room. Even the necessity of conducting the entire conversation in lowered tones, in order not to disturb the sleeping household, added to the aguish, strained feeling of which she was conscious.
“There is only one thing to do, Tony,” she said at last. “You must tell Sir Philip.”
A sharp ejaculation escaped him, hastily stifled as she raised a warning finger enjoining silence.
“Sh! Don’t make a noise! We mustn’t wake any one,” she cautioned him. “You must tell Sir Philip,” she resumed. “There’s simply nothing else to be done.”
“It would be utterly useless,” he replied with quiet conviction. “He wouldn’t pay. He said he wouldn’t, last time. And he meant it.... You’d better have let me blow out my brains while I was about it, Ann”—with, a mirthless laugh.
“Don’t talk rot,” she returned succinctly.