“Oh, Edward—I’m so foolish. I—”
“Have you thirty dollars?”
“I—I don’t think so.”
“Have you twenty?”
“I haven’t—more than that.” She had, as she well knew, the sum of nine dollars and sixty-seven cents in the purse in her dressing table drawer.
“Will this help you out?” His tone had the business-like quality in it as natural as breathing to a man when he speaks of money matters, and which a woman feels almost as a personal condemnation in its chill removal from sentiment.
“Oh, Edward—please don’t! It makes me feel so—” She tried not to be too abject. “But nearly all of it has gone for necessary things.”
“That’s all right.” He added with a touch of severity. “Don’t let there be any mistake about it this time, Jo,” and she murmured contentedly,
“No. No, indeed.”
With her allowance money, too, how could there be?