"I am more business-like than you are. I remember perfectly well that your father paid more than a thousand pounds for those books in the beginning."
"That needn't trouble you. It has been virtually deducted. I'm sorry to say a few very valuable books were sold before the mortgage and could not be recovered."
He had given himself away by that word "recovered." Her eyes searched him through and through to find his falsehood, as they had searched him once before to find his truth. "It is very, very good of you," she said.
"Of me? Am I bothering you? Don't think of me except as my father's executor."
"Did you know that he wanted you to do this, or did you only think it? Was it really his express wish?"
He looked her in the face and lied boldly and freely. "It was. Absolutely."
And as she met that look, so luminously, so superlatively sincere, she knew that he had lied. "All the same," said she, "I can't take it. Don't think it unfriendly of me. It isn't. In fact, don't you see it's just because we have been—we are—friends that I must refuse it? I can't take advantage of that"—she was going to say "feeling," but thought better of it.
"And don't you see by refusing you are compelling me to be dishonourable? If you were really my friend you would think more of my honour than of your own scruples. Or is that asking too much?" He felt that he had scored in this game of keen intelligences.
"No. But it would be wrong of me to let your honour be influenced by our friendship."
"Don't think of our friendship, then. It's all pure business, as brutally impersonal as you like."