"Oh?" Robert said, surprised. "Why?"
"Much too good to be true, she said she was. She said no girl of fifteen was ever as good as that."
"She's sixteen now."
All right, sixteen. She said she was fifteen once and so were all her girl friends, and that wide-eyed-wonder didn't fool her for a moment."
"I'm very much afraid it will fool a jury."
"Not if you had an all-woman jury. I suppose there's no way of wangling that?"
"Not short of Herod measures. Don't you want to give this money to Mrs. Sharpe yourself, by the way?"
"Not me. You'll be going out there sometime today, and you can give it to her if you like. But see you get it back and put it in the bank or they'll be picking it out of flower vases years hence and wondering when they put that there."
Robert smiled as he put the money away in his pocket to the sound of Stanley's departing feet. Endlessly unexpected, people were. He would have taken it for granted that Stan would have revelled in counting those notes out in front of the old lady. But instead he had turned shy. That tale of money in tea-pots was just a tale.
Robert took the money out to The Franchise in the afternoon, and for the first time saw tears in Marion's eyes. He told the tale as Stanley had told it-tea-pots and all-and finished: "So he made me his deputy"; and it was then that Marion's eyes had filled.