“Have you counted the cost?” she asked, and there was something quite sepulchral in her solemn tone.
“I have given it consideration, Cornelia; both as regards money and time. The expenses are not worth naming, should there be no opposition. And if there is any—”
“Ay!” groaned Miss Corny. “If there is?”
“Well? I am not without a few hundred to spare for the playing,” he said, turning upon her the good-humored light of his fine countenance.
Miss Carlyle emitted some dismal groans.
“That ever I should have lived to see this day! To hear money talked of as though it were dirt. And what’s to become of your business?” she sharply added. “Is that to be let run to rack and ruin, while you are kicking up your heels in that wicked London, under plea of being at the House night after night?”
“Cornelia,” he gravely said, “were I dead, Dill could carry on the business just as well as it is being carried on now. I might go into a foreign country for seven years and come back to find the business as flourishing as ever, for Dill could keep it together. And even were the business to drop off—though I tell you it will not do so—I am independent of it.”
Miss Carlyle faced tartly round upon Barbara.
“Have you been setting him on to this?”
“I think he had made up his mind before he spoke to me. But,” added Barbara, in her truth, “I urged him to accept it.”