“Come in here,” she said metallically, looking at the spare figure and keen, kind eyes. “I want to speak to you.”
“My boots are dirty.”
“Never mind. Come now; if you don’t, I may change again, and that will be the worse for both of us.”
Until he came in at the door, stooping his head a little because it was so low, she kept her throbbing eyes upon those words, “Edred Crisp, Esq., Marquise Mansions, W.”
“I’ve been to Liddleshorn and seen Preece about the wedding-cake,” he said.
“The wedding-cake!” she repeated blankly. “Oh, you need not have troubled. It does not matter in the least.”
Jethro was looking puzzled—a little annoyed, too. Her unequal moods of late vexed him. He was a short-tempered man, given to fits of silence and brusquerie, just as his father had been. Men in the country are often so; she had noticed that young Jim Jayne snubbed Annie. In towns a man goes out and blows off his temper—at his club or a music-hall; in the country he vents it on his women.
“Doesn’t matter? That sounds strange from you, Pamela.”
She laughed. The steady look in her eyes, the lambent light on her face, struck him. She seemed swept, dominated by a sudden fierce, irrevocable decision. The newspaper, wide open at the page-advertisement of the new company, was on her knees. She put her finger under Edred’s name and showed it to him.
“Umph! Well, he has never written a line since he went away—didn’t even send the telegram. Still, I’m glad he’s getting on. Looks like business, doesn’t it?” He read the name and address in a rather awe-struck way. “There seems to be money in that. How much capital, do they say? He hasn’t been long in making his fortune. Perhaps he’ll pay me back the two hundred. It was understood between us to be only a loan—if he succeeded. What are the Chinese beggars doing at——”