"B'gad!" said the colonel, with a laugh that approached the falsetto, "if she doesn't cut a dash in town' this winter, I miss my guess."
"Oh—are you to be in town?" inquired Mr. Rivett.
"I? No; Palm Beach," said the colonel hastily, watching the other out of his pale and protruding eyes. "And then—I don't go in for such capers," he explained with a pained expression. "What a man jokes about, he never bothers with."
"I've joked many a man out of half a million," observed Rivett grimly.
"That's different.... I'm a settled citizen." He looked cautiously at Rivett, hesitated, then said carelessly: "I mean to marry, some day."
"Do you?"
"I do, certainly.... And I flatter myself that the woman I marry will receive her equivalent, sir."
"Her moral equivalent?"
"Certainly. Perhaps not her—ah—financial equivalent." He looked up at Rivett to see how he took it. Rivett neither took it nor rejected it, apparently, and the colonel probed further.
"I expect to wait a year or two——"