“Yes; that has nothing to do with my father; that nobody can interfere with. It comes from my old relative, old Sir Walter. He has left me ten thousand pounds.”
“Ten thousand pounds!” she repeated, with a quickly drawn breath, then paused a little; “that is a very nice sum of money. I am very glad you’ve got all that. How much will it bring in by the year?”
He was a little checked in his enthusiasm by this inquiry; and, to tell the truth, it was not a question he had considered or knew very well how to answer.
“You might get five hundred a year for it if you were very very lucky; but I don’t think,” she said, “you will get so much as that.”
“At all events,” he said, somewhat sobered, “it will be my own; it will be something I can spend as I please, and with which nobody will have any right to interfere. We could have existed perhaps on my allowance; but it would have been hard upon my darling cooping her up in a small cottage, with scarcely money enough to live upon—”
He thought perhaps she would interrupt him here, and cry out, as he himself would have done, what did that matter, so long as they were together? But she did not do this. She was quite silent, waiting for him to go on.
“But now,” he continued, “it will be different. We can enjoy ourselves a little. I don’t suppose we shall be rich even now.”
“No,” she said, quietly, “you will not be rich.”
He turned and looked into her face, but in the darkness he could see nothing. And then he was used to these little prudential ways she had, and the superior knowledge which she claimed of the world.
“Perhaps not rich, but well off, don’t you think?” he said, with a little timidity, “to begin upon; and then there would be Penton in the distance. Penton is a noble place. All the time of the ball I was thinking of you, how you would have liked it, and how much more beautiful it would have been had you been there. We must give a ball some time, when we come home—”