The ghost of a grim smile flitted over his face: certainly for consummate folly he thought these great folks beat anything in all creation.
“Oh, don’t laugh at one, Billy,” she said with genuine mortification and shame in her voice. “You don’t know what it is to want money as we do.”
He looked at her indulgently.
“I dare say it’s hard on you. You have to keep up all that swagger on nothing. Well, as I understand the matter, you must have these diamonds before Monday forenoon, eh?”
“Yes,” she said shortly, with a catch in her breath; she felt by the change in his tone how far she had descended from her pedestal by her confession. “Oh, the brute!” she thought passionately; “how I should love to strangle him and fling him into the Thames pea-soup!”
“What is it you want me to do?” he asked, whilst he knew without asking; but he liked “to keep her nose to the grindstone”; he was but paying in fair coin the innumerable insults she had passed on him, the countless awkward and painful moments she had entailed on him.
She took up all her courage and trusted to the magic of her influence over him.
“I want you to go over to Paris and get them for me. I dare say you could get them for half price. Beaumont would be afraid of you.”
His face did not reveal his thoughts; his dull grey eyes stared at her fixedly.
“What was the sum you had from him?”