"Tell me now—enumerate—what have I promised to do for them?"
She lifted her eyes then. He was not looking at her, but brushing the sleeve of his coat where a crumb had fallen upon it. This avoidance gave her courage. "To educate Tony," said her voice, so fatally like her mother's in its cadenced sweetness, "to allow mother three hundred pounds a year, and to let Pansy have the best advice and treatment for her lameness."
"I admit all that, right enough. Anything more?"
"To settle five thousand pounds on me——"
He looked in triumph at Mrs. Mynors. "Admirable!" he said, with a sarcasm which penetrated to the girl's intelligence with a shock. She broke off, startled.
"All right," he told her soothingly. "I agree to that too. Anything more?"
"Our solicitor, Mr. Askew, said there was another thing that I ought to ask," she replied, quite tranquilly. "It is that you should make a will in my favour, so that if anything happened to you, we should not be left destitute."
He once more let his mocking glance lash Mrs. Mynors. "I appreciate my future wife's business capacity," said he, "but I warn you that I am horribly healthy. Except for the accident which lamed me, I have not had a day's illness in my life. I fear I shan't oblige you by dying just yet."
Virgie grew pink. "Oh, I beg your pardon! That must have sounded very cold-blooded," she apologised. "But you said it was a business offer, did you not?"
He smiled for the first time. Dropping his voice to a low persuasiveness: "Did you quite believe that?" he asked.