“What on earth do you mean?” exclaimed George Godolphin.
“Is there anything the matter? Or is the Bank as solvent as it ought to be?”
“I should be sorry to think it otherwise,” replied George. “I don’t understand you. What have you heard?”
“Just what I tell you. A friend spoke to me in private yesterday, when I was at Binham, saying that he had heard a suspicion of something being wrong with the Bank here. You will not be surprised that I thought of the nine thousand pounds I had just paid in.”
“Who said it?” asked George. “I’ll prosecute him if I can find out.”
“I dare say you would. But I have not come here to make mischief. I stopped his repeating it, and I, you know, am safe, so there’s no harm done. I have passed an uneasy night, and I have come to ask you to tell me the truth in all good faith.”
“The Bank is all right,” said George. “I cannot imagine how such a report could by any possibility have arisen,” he continued, quitting the one point for the other. “There is no foundation for it.”
George Godolphin spoke in all good faith when he said he could not tell how the report could have arisen. He really could not. Nothing had transpired at Prior’s Ash to give rise to it. Possibly he deemed, in his sanguine temperament, that he spoke in equally good faith, when assuring Mr. Hastings that the Bank was all right: he may have believed that it would so continue.
“Perfectly safe.”