“Not take the money? Nonsense!” she cried. “Father has more than he knows what to do with!”
She paused a while, finger on lip, meditating, the double ply of calculation, stamped on her father’s brow, very strongly marked on hers.
“Look here, Duncan,” she said caressingly, like a grown woman wooing to get her own way, so deep her voice was, “daddy is giving you that money because you are going to marry me, isn’t he?”
I signed, as well as I could, that Mr. Robert Anderson of Birkenbog considered himself as so doing.
She clapped her hands and cried out, as if she had stumbled on the solution of some exceedingly difficult problem, “Why, then, take the money and give it to Tom! He needs it for his farm—oh, just dreadful. He says the hill is not half stocked, and that a hundred or two more ewes would just be the saving of him!”
“But,” said I, “I shall be entering into an agreement with your father, and shall have to give him receipts!”
“Well,” she continued boldly, “Thomas will enter into an agreement with you, if he doesn’t marry me—that is, if I am left on your hands—he will pay you the money back—or else give you the sheep!”
It will hardly be believed the difficulty I had to make Charlotte see the impossibility—nay, the dishonesty of an arrangement which appeared so simple to her. She thought for a while that I was just doing it out of jealousy, and she sulked.
I reasoned with her, but I might as well have tried logic on the Gallaberry black-faced ewes. She continued to revolve the project in her own mind.
“Whatever you—I mean we—can get out of father is to the good,” she said. “He will never miss it. If you don’t, I will ask him for the money for your fees myself and give it to Tom——”