“Their schooling and board are paid for up to Christmas,” Mrs. Dabney objected, blankly.
“Bah!” Thorpe prolonged the emphatic exclamation into something good-natured, and ended it with an abrupt laugh. “What on earth difference does that make? I could go and buy their damned colleges, and let the kids wear them for breastpins if I wanted to. You said the girl was going to quit at Christmas in any case. Won't she learn more in four months travelling about on the Continent, than she would trotting around in her own tracks there at Cheltenham?
“And it's even more important for the boy. He's of an age when he ought to see something of the world, and I ought to see something of him. Whatever he's going to do, it's time that he began getting his special start for it.” He added, upon a luminous afterthought: “Perhaps his seeing the old Italian picture galleries and so on will cure him of wanting to be an artist.”
The mother's air displayed resigned acquiescence rather than conviction. “Well--if you really think it's best,” she began, “I don't know that I ought to object. Goodness knows, I don't want to stand in their way. Ever since you sent that four hundred pounds, it hasn't seemed as if they were my children at all. They've scarcely listened to me. And now you come, and propose to take them out of my hands altogether--and all I can say is--I hope you feel entirely justified. And so, shall I write them to come home? When do you think of starting? Julia ought to have some travelling clothes.”
“I can wait till you get her ready--only you must hurry up about it.”
Remembering something, he took out his cheque-book, and spread it on the desk. “I will give you back that thirty,” he said, as he wrote, “and here's a hundred to get the youngsters ready. You won't waste any time, will you? and if you want more tell me.”
A customer had entered the shop, and Thorpe made it the occasion for leaving.
His sister, looking after her brother with the cheque in her hand, was conscious of a thought which seemed to spell itself out in visible letters before her mental vision. “Even now I don't believe in him,” the impalpable legend ran.
GENERAL KERVICK was by habit a punctual man, and Thorpe found him hovering, carefully gloved and fur-coated, in the neighbourhood of the luncheon-room when he arrived. It indeed still lacked a few minutes of the appointed hour when they thus met and went in together. They were fortunate enough to find a small table out on the balcony, sufficiently removed from any other to give privacy to their conversation.