“What is your motive?” she asked.
“Well, I hate going slap-dash into the middle of a thing without any preface; I like to approach it in my own way.”
“Yes, I know; your way of approaching a subject is to walk in a circle round it. But please dash into the middle of it for once.”
“Well, then, to tell you the plain truth, I am beginning to think that money-getting is not the only thing in life—”
“What a discovery for a Manchester man to make! The millennium must have dawned at last on your smoky old town!”
He laughed at her words, but refused to go on with the subject.
“I was only teasing you a little,” he said. “It gladdens me even to see you put yourself in a temper, Mary—it brings back old times when we were always such good friends, and sometimes had such grand quarrels.”
Mary also laughed, and rang the bell for afternoon tea. She was curious to hear about the “selfish motive,” but remembered the family failing, and forbore to press him.
According to his own accounts, Mr. Tom Starbrow was up in town on business; apparently the business was not of a very pressing nature, as most of his time during the next few days was spent at Dawson Place, where he and his sister had endless conversations about old times. Then he would go with Fan to explore Whiteley's, which seemed to require a great deal of exploring; and from these delightful rambles they would return laden with treasures—choice bon-bons, exotic flowers and hot-house grapes at five or six shillings a pound; quaint Japanese knick-knacks; books and pictures, and photographs of celebrated men—great beetle-browed philosophers, and men of blood and thunder; also of women still more celebrated, on and off the stage. Mr. Starbrow would have nothing sent; the whole fun of the thing, he assured Fan, was in carrying all their purchases home themselves; and so, laden with innumerable small parcels, they would return chatting and laughing like the oldest and best of friends, happy and light-hearted as children.
At last one day Mr. Starbrow went back to the old subject. “Mary, my girl,” he said, “have you thought over the advice I gave you about this white child of yours?”