There was something significant in the way he steadied it upon the veranda railing, and stooped with his head down to pore over it.
The blow was at first almost staggering. It was as though the high gods had shot down a bolt from heaven, shattering his world, and leaving him alone in Chaos. They had taken him at his word—had registered on the instant his impious declaration. It WAS the end of everything. She was to quit.... He had said, the sooner the better.... Well—he wasn't going to let even the high gods get a rise out of him.
He laughed. By one of those strange links of association, which at moments of unexpected crisis bring back things impersonal, unconnected, the sound of his own laugh recalled the rattle of earth, upon the dry outside of a sheet of bark in which, during one of their boundary rides at Breeza Downs lately, they had wrapped for burial the body of a shepherd found dead in the bush. Both sounds seemed to him as of something dead—something outside humanity.
He handed her back the telegram, speaking still as if he were far-off—on the other side of a grave, but quite collectedly and as though in the long silence he had been weighing the question.
'It seems to me that this has come to you in the nick of time, to solve difficulties.'
'Yes,' she assented dully.
'You've got no choice but to go as your cousin says. There's money depending on it.'
'Money! ... Oh, money!' she cried wildly.
'Money is apt to stick on to lawyers' fingers when they're left to the handling of it .... This is a matter of business, and business can't be put on one side—especially, when there's as large a sum as fifty thousand pounds in the proposition. I guess from this that you're wanted.'
'Yes,' she said again. She was thinking to herself, 'That's his Scotch carefulness about money; he wouldn't consider anything in comparison with that.'