‘Half!’
‘Half!’ she echoed, with a bitter laugh. ‘You are joking. Twenty thousand pounds! Oh, you have made a mistake. You should go to a millionaire, not come to me.’
‘Do I understand you to decline?’
‘Decline!’ she exclaimed in a fury. ‘Rather than pay that money to them, I would starve and rot! Rather than pay that, the money shall remain in its secret hiding-place till it is forgotten!—Do you take me for an idiot, a drivelling old woman with one foot in the grave? No, no, no! You do not know Selina Wakefield yet. Twenty thousand pounds. Ah, ah, ah! The fools, the fools, the miserable fools, to come and ask me this!’
‘Perhaps you will be good enough to name a sum you consider to be equivalent to the service rendered,’ said the American, totally unmoved by this torrent of invective.
‘Now you talk like a man of sense,’ she replied. ‘You are quite determined, I see, not to part with your secret until you have a return. Well, let me see. What do you say to a thousand pounds, or, to stretch a point, fifteen hundred?’
‘Appalling generosity!’ replied Slimm, regarding the ceiling in rapture—‘wasteful extravagance! I cannot accept it. My principals are so grasping, you know. Now, as a personal favour, and to settle this little difficulty, could not you add, say, another five pounds?’
‘Not another farthing.’
‘Then I am afraid our interview is at an end,’ he said regretfully.—‘Now, look here. My friends are in no need of money, and are a long way from the state you charitably hoped to find them in. You are getting on in life, and we can afford to wait. When you are no more—not to put too fine a point upon it—we shall lay hands on the treasure, and live happily ever after—yes, madam.’
‘What do you want me to do?’ she said sulkily.