Slyne almost smiled. "Why cut off your own nose to spite your face?" he returned. "You won't refuse, because it would cost you a hundred thousand dollars to do so."
Captain Dove stroked his chin contemplatively, and his face slowly cleared.
"A hundred and fifty thousand, you mean," he said in a most malevolent tone.
Slyne got up from the table as if in anger, and for some time the two wrangled over that point, the stout solicitor gazing at them with evident dismay, while Sallie awaited the upshot of it all with bated breath. She knew it was over the price to be paid for her that they were disputing, but that knowledge had ceased to be any novelty. The wrathful voices of the two disputants seemed to come from a great distance. She felt as if the whole affair were a dream from which she might at any moment awake on board the Olive Branch again.
"There isn't money enough in it to pay you so much for a mere affidavit," she heard Slyne say, and Mr. Jobling, under his glance, confirmed that statement emphatically.
"A hundred and twenty-one thousand is the last limit—a thousand down, to bind the bargain, and the balance the day of my wedding with Sallie," Slyne declared. "If that doesn't satisfy you—there's nothing more to be said. And I'll maybe find other means—"
"Show me even the first thousand," requested Captain Dove, and Slyne counted out on to the table, at a safe distance from the old man's twitching fingers, five thousand francs of the amount Lord Ingoldsby had paid him for his car.
"All right," said Captain Dove gruffly, and snatched at the notes. But Slyne picked them up again.
"As soon as you've given Jobling your statement," he said, "and signed whatever other documents he may think necessary, I'll hand you these and my note of hand, endorsed by him, for the balance remaining due you."
Mr. Jobling picked up a pen and Slyne pushed a sheet of foolscap toward him. Captain Dove, with a grunt of disgust, sat back in his chair and, while the lawyer wrote rapidly, related how he had found Sallie.