It was a laughing challenge, made on the assumption that it would not be taken up, and, as she looked away uncomfortably under his glance, his laughter increased.
“That’s not quite so easy as advising, is it?” he rallied her.
She commanded herself, and looked him squarely in the eyes.
“Oh, yes, it is,” she assured him. “If you was serious I could soon produce the lady—a comely enough woman of about your own age, mistress of thirty thousand pounds and some property, besides.”
That sobered him. He stared at her a moment; the pipe between his fingers.
“And she would marry a vagabond? Odds, my life! What ails her?”
“Naught ails her. If you was serious I’d present her.”
“’Sblood! you make me serious. Thirty thousand pounds! Faith, that is serious enough. I could set up as a country squire on that.”
“Then why don’t you?”
Really, she was bewildering, he thought, with her calm assumptions that it was for him to say the word.