“Have you thrown it away? I am very sorry. I—wonder—” Lucy looked at him doubtfully, almost wistfully. Was she going to offer him some of hers? he asked himself. He was at once amused and touched, and full of expectation as to what she would say next; but Lucy changed her tone. “I will not throw it away,” she said, quietly. “Papa directed me, before he died, what to do with it. It is a great responsibility;” and here she paused and looked at him once more. Was she going to confide some secret to him? Sir Thomas was very much puzzled, indeed, more than he remembered ever to have been puzzled by any girl. He was a man over thirty, a man of large experience, but this young creature was a novelty to him.
“I should like to see how you will spend your fortune,” he said. “I shall watch what you do with it. Mine went before I took time to consider the responsibility. Marriage is not the only thing that one does in haste and repents at leisure. I am very sorry now, I can tell you, that I was such a fool when I was young.”
“I—wonder—” Lucy said again, softly, to herself. She could not help longing to tell somebody her secret, somebody that would feel a little sympathy for her—why not this big, kind, genial stranger, who was quite unlike all the rest of her people? who would surely understand, she thought. But Sir Thomas did not in the least understand. He thought she would have liked to give him some of her money, and, indeed, for his own part, he would not have had the slightest objection to accept the whole of it, as his aunt had planned and hoped; but a portion would be impossible. He laughed, looking at her, in his turn, with kindness in his amusement.
“Are you meditating some benevolence?” he said. “But, Miss Lucy, benevolence is a very doubtful virtue. You must reflect well, and take the advice of your business people. You must not be too ready to give away. You see, though I have not known you long, I am disposed to take upon me the tone of a mentor already, an uncle experienced and elderly, or something of that sort.”
“Indeed, that is just what I should like,” Lucy said, simply.
This was a dreadful dash of cold water in his face. It is one thing to call yourself experienced and elderly, and quite another to be taken at your word. He laughed again, but this time at himself, and accepted the position with a curious sense of its inappropriateness which was all the more vivid because she did not seem to see it to be inappropriate at all.
“Well,” he said, “that’s a bargain. When you want to do anything angelically silly, and throw away your money, you are to come and consult me.”
“Do you really mean it?” said Lucy, with most serious eyes.
“I really mean it, and there is my hand upon it,” he said. She put her hand into his with gentle confidence, and he held it for a moment, looking at the slender fingers. Lucy, as has been said, had, though she had no right to it, a pretty hand. “What a little bit of a thing,” he said, “to have so much to give away.”
“Yes,” Lucy said, with a long breath that was scarcely a sigh, and without the vestige of a blush of embarrassment, “it is a great responsibility.” She was as sincere and serious as if she had been an old woman, Sir Thomas felt, and he laughed and let the little hand drop. His fatherly flirtation, a mode which he had known to be very efficacious, had no more effect than if he had been a hundred. This failure tickled his sense of humor, far more than success would have pleased him otherwise.