“You are cruel to me, very cruel,” she sobs, always with a due regard to the artistic, “but you will promise me one thing, won’t you, Carl? It is that, once married, and the fortune secured, I shall see you again as often as I do now.”
“All right, Flora, but that will be on one condition. It is that you won’t bother me with letters or anything. Letters are so deuced dangerous, you know, especially if one’s wife gets hold of them, and grows close-fisted with the pocket-money. If I marry Crystal Meredyth,” he adds to himself, “she’ll have to fork out pretty considerably to make up for the amount of insipid talk that falls from her lips. Now if it was Zai! Ah! I’d take her with nothing, and work like a slave to keep my dainty little girl clothed like a princess, but she has thrown me over for that lardy-dardy swell, and joy go with her.”
“Good-night, Flora,” he says, rising lazily, “and mind and keep my counsel. If father and mother Meredyth, who are the properest couple alive, were to hear one whisper about you, they would send me flying.”
“I’ll keep your counsel, Carl; I wouldn’t injure a hair of your head, not to save my life.”
“Well, perhaps you wouldn’t, little woman, or perhaps you would, cela selon. I never had much faith in mankind, or womankind either to say the truth, and I am too old in worldly wisdom to begin now—ta-ta.”
END OF VOLUME I.
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