“Well, if he wants to live, why doesn’t he?” inquired McNason, lazily.
“Simply because he can’t afford it,” replied Pitt, bluntly.
The great millionaire took up a poker, and looking critically at the fire, broke a large gaseous lump of coal into a bright blaze.
“Oh! Well, that settles it,” he said. “Then I suppose he must, as the common folk say, ‘go home’!”
A sparkle of indignation lightened Mr. Pitt’s quiet grey eyes. But he restrained his feelings.
“The operation fee would be a hundred guineas,” he went on in a calm business-like tone—“Good nursing and a change of air would perhaps run into a hundred more. Say two hundred pounds. That sum would save his life.”
“I daresay!” And McNason’s thin lips widened into a grin—“But if he hasn’t got the two hundred, he must accept the inevitable. After all, when a man is nearly sixty, a few years more or less in the world doesn’t matter!”
Mr. Pitt looked at his employer steadily.
“Have you any cause of complaint or offence against Dove, sir?”
McNason met his inquiring eyes with his own special gimlet glance, sharp as the point of a screw.