"I couldn't think. It frightened me. 'The Shares,' you know. Whose Shares? Of what? I'm terribly, terribly ignorant."
"Ah," he echoed, "the Shares—as the blackbird said to the Cherry Tree. And there was nobody, you thought, to discuss the letter with? You didn't answer it?"
"Nobody," said I, with a shake of my head, and smoothing my silk skirts over my knees.
"Why, of course not," he sparkled. "You see how admirably things work out. Miss Fenne, Mr Pellew, Mrs Bowater, my wife, Tom o' Bedlam, Hypnos, Mrs Monnerie, Mr Bowater, Mrs Bowater, the Harrises, Me. 'Pon my word, you'd think it was a plot. Now, supposing I keep this letter—could you trust it with me for a while?—and supposing I see these gentlemen, and make a few inquiries; and that in the meantime—we—we bottle the Cherries? But first, I must have a little more information. Your father, my dear. Let's just unbosom ourselves of all this horrible old money-grubbing, and see exactly how we stand."
I needed no second invitation, and poured out helter-skelter all (how very little, in my girlish folly) that I knew about my father's affairs, and of how I had been "left."
"And Miss Fenne, now?" he peered out, as if at my godmother herself. "Why didn't she send word to France? Where is this providential step-grandfather, Monsieur Pierre de Ronvel, all this time? Not dead too?"
Shamefully I had to confess that I did not know; had not even inquired. "It is my miserable ingratitude. I just blow hot and cold; that is my nature."
"Well, well, it may be so." He smiled at me, as if out of the distance, with the serenest kindliness. "But you and I are going to share the temperate zone—a cool, steady, Trade Wind."
"If only," I smiled, taking him up on this familiar ground, "if only I could keep clear of the Tropics—and that Sargasso Sea!"