Bob looked rueful.
"We don't, but Mrs. Rider will. These old girls are regular nuts on the cash; she's sure to want to know what we've got."
"Then, of course, you will tell her everything?"
They looked at each other a little sorrowfully. It was Dick who made answer.
"If we do, the engagements will be off. We shall have to cut the girls to-morrow, and it would make it awkward for them. Don't you think we could have a truce or something—lie low until the night before we go? Don't you think that, Mrs. Kennaird?"
Lily shook her head.
"I think you are a pair of babies," she said emphatically. "You don't seem to know whether you wish to marry or not. That enters into the question, I think; you certainly ought to make up your minds."
They nodded their heads as though perfectly in accord with so obvious a truth. Presently, Bob, who hugged his knee during the harangue—not under the delusion that it was Nellie Rider's waist, but because he did not know what to do with his hands—spoke for the pair of them.
"You see," he said—and Lily saw nothing but the humour of it—"you see it's this way. Dick's a sentimentalist, and I'm a philosopher, and we've tumbled into the same boat somehow. I would like to marry Nellie if I could make her happy, and all that sort of thing; but it's rotten beginning on two hundred a year, and Dick's only got a hundred and ninety. Now what I feel is this: Is it quite fair to the girls?"
"Did you think of that when you proposed to them this morning?"