with a small capital if you made up your mind to emigrate. I had much rather give you the money to invest at home. You are the last of my clan—my only near relative—and I don't want to lose you. I look to you and Hilda, and your children, to brighten the decline of my life."
"O Dora, that seems a poor substitute for those who should be nearer and dearer," cried Bothwell. In the next instant he would gladly have recalled his words, for he saw the tears well up to his cousin's eyes, and he knew that her childless marriage was a grief.
"You are too good, far more generous than I deserve," he went on hurriedly. "But let the money be at least called a loan. If fortune favour me within the next few years, it will be such a pleasure to give you back your money. And if Fate prove unkind, I shall know I have not a hard creditor. But I have made up my mind to be successful. I mean to work as men seldom work—to make everything I do a labour of love. And with such a wife as Hilda—"
"Hilda will be a wife in a thousand. I am sure your pupils will adore her; and you must make your house very pretty, for Hilda's sake. Seven hundred will not be half enough."
"It will be more than enough. You don't know how economically I can build, and how cleverly Hilda and I will contrive to furnish. We will ride over the country to overhaul all the cottages and farmhouses in quest of neglected old bits of Chippendale and Sheraton. We shall get lovely old things for a mere song, and find some clever jobbing cabinet-maker to make them as good as new—"
"And in the end you will find they will have cost you more than if you had bought them from Nosotti," said Dora, laughing at his eagerness. "I know how costly that kind of economy is apt to prove in the long-run. You had better get your Sheraton or your Chippendale furniture made on purpose for you, new and sound and convenient, and of more charming designs than Chippendale ever imagined."
"No, Dora. I am intense as a Chippendalist. I must have the real thing—old, and inconvenient even, if you like."
"What a boy you are still, Bothwell! And now I am going to tell you something that will please you."
"Hilda is coming here to-morrow," speculated Bothwell eagerly.
"No. Hilda is not coming back while her brother is away. That is not my good news, Bothwell. It is even better than that."
And then she told him the contents of Heathcote's letter.
"I am very glad," he said quietly. "That is at least one knocked off the list of my suspicious friends."
