“Tut—tut—tut, girl! What romantic rubbish have you got into your head? Cope’s a nice young fellow, and when you were his wife you would soon learn to love him well enough, I warrant. All I’m afraid of is that he won’t have you for a wife—and all through my fault—all through my fault!”
Jane saw that the present was no time to say more on the point, and wisely held her tongue. For a little while the silence between them was unbroken.
“But I haven’t told you the worst yet, Jenny,” he said at last.
“Oh! papa.”
“Five thousand pounds of your Aunt Fanny’s money has been lost in the crash. She had entrusted me with the money to do the best I could for her, and that’s the result. She will be at Pincote in less than a week from now, and the first thing she will do, after she has taken off her bonnet and changed her boots, will be to ask me for her money. She will ask me for her money, and what am I to say to her?”
“Good gracious, papa! Aunt Fanny is your own sister, and surely she, of all people in the world, would be the last to trouble you for her money.”
“She would be the first,” said the Squire, fiercely. “I’d sooner, far sooner, be indebted to the veriest stranger than to her. You don’t know your aunt as I know her. I should never hear the last of it. I should have no peace of my life. Day and night my turpitude—my vile criminality, as she would call it—would be dinned into my ears, till I should be driven half crazy. And not only that: your Aunt Fanny is a woman who can never keep a secret. To one confidential friend after another the whole affair would be whispered, with sundry embellishments of her own, till at last the whole country side would know of it, and I could never hold up my head in society again.”
“As I understand the case, papa, you want to raise five thousand pounds within the next few days?”
“That is precisely what I want.”
“Then why not ask Mr. Cope? Surely he would not refuse to lend it to you.”