“Ah, believe me,” she was saying, “Rudolph isn’t an ophthalmic bat.  But God keep us all respectable! is Rudolph’s notion of a sensible morning-prayer.  So he just preferred to see nothing and bleat out edifying axioms.  That is one of his favorite tricks.  No, it was a comedy for my benefit, I tell you.  He will allow a deal for the artistic temperament, no doubt, but he doesn’t suppose you fetch along a white-lace parasol when you go to watch a sunset—­especially a parasol he gave me last month.”

“Indeed,” protested Mr. Charteris, “he saw nothing.  I was too quick for him.”

She shrugged her shoulders.  “I saw him looking at it.  Accordingly, I paid no attention to what he said.  But you—­ah, Jack, you were splendid!  I suppose we shall have to elope at once now, though?”

Charteris gave her no immediate answer.  “I am not quite sure, Patricia, that your husband is not—­to a certain extent—­in the right.  Believe me, he did not know you were about.  He approached me in a perfectly sensible manner, and exhibited commendable self-restraint; he has played a difficult part to admiration.  I could not have done it better myself.  And it is not for us who have been endowed with gifts denied to Rudolph, to reproach him for lacking the finer perceptions and sensibilities of life.  Yet, I must admit that, for the time, I was a little hurt by his evident belief that we would allow our feeling for each other—­which is rather beyond his comprehension, isn’t it, dear?—­to be coerced by mercenary considerations.”

“Oh, Rudolph is just a jackass-fool, anyway.”  She was not particularly interested in the subject.

“He can’t help that, you know,” Charteris reminded her, gently; then, he asked, after a little:  “I suppose it is all true?”

“That what is true?”

“About your having no money of your own?” He laughed, but she could see how deeply he had been pained by Musgrave’s suspicions.  “I ask, because, as your husband has discovered, I am utterly sordid, my lady, and care only for your wealth.”

“Ah, how can you expect a man like that to understand—­you?  Why, Jack, how ridiculous in you to be hurt by what the brute thinks!  You’re as solemn as an owl, my dear.  Yes, it’s true enough.  My father was not very well pleased with us—­and that horrid will—­Ah, Jack, Jack, how grotesque, how characteristic it was, his thinking such things would influence you—­you, of all men, who scarcely know what money is!”

“It was even more grotesque I should have been pained by his thinking it,” Charteris said, sadly.  “But what would you have?  I am so abominably in love with you that it seemed a sort of desecration when the man lugged your name into a discussion of money-matters.  It really did.  And then, besides—­ah, my lady, you know that I would glory in the thought that I had given up all for you.  You know, I think, that I would willingly work my fingers to the bone just