But Tarrant quietly brought a bottle and glass from his cupboard.  Nancy again refused, pettishly.

‘Until you have drunk,’ he said, with a smile of self-will, ’I shall tell you nothing.’

‘I don’t know what I’ve done to make you like this.’

Her sobs and tears returned.  After a moment of impatience, Tarrant went up to her with the glass, laid a hand upon her shoulder, and kissed her.

’Now, come, be reasonable.  We have uncommonly serious things to talk about.’

‘What did your friend think of me?’

’That you were one of the prettiest girls he had ever been privileged to see, and that I was an enviable fellow to have such a visitor.  There now, another sip, and let us have some colour back into your cheeks.  There’s bad news, Nancy; confoundedly bad news, dear girl.  My grandmother was dead when I got there.  Well, the foolish old woman has been muddling her affairs for a long time, speculating here and there without taking any one’s advice, and so on; and the result is that she leaves nothing at all.’

Nancy was mute.

’Less than nothing, indeed.  She owed a few hundreds that she had no means of paying.  The joke of the thing is, that she has left an elaborate will, with legacies to half-a-dozen people, myself first of all.  If she had been so good as to die two years ago, I should have come in for a thousand a year or so.  No one suspected what was going on; she never allowed Vawdrey, the one man who could have been useful to her, to have an inkling of the affair.  An advertising broker got her in his clutches.  Vawdrey’s lawyer has been going through her papers, and finds everything quite intelligible.  The money has gone in lumps, good after bad.  Swindling, of course, but perfectly legal swindling, nothing to be done about it.  A minute or two before her death she gasped out some words of revelation to the nurse, enough to set Vawdrey on the track, when he was told.’

Still the listener said nothing.

’Well, I had a talk with Vawdrey.  He’s a blackguard, but not a bad fellow.  Wished he could help me, but didn’t quite see how, unless I would go into business.  However, he had a suggestion to make.’

For Nancy, the pause was charged with apprehensions.  She seemed to discover in her husband’s face a purpose which he knew would excite her resistance.

’He and I have often talked about my friend Sutherland, in the Bahamas, and Vawdrey has an idea that there’ll be a profitable opening in that quarter, before long.  Sutherland has written to me lately that he thinks of bestirring himself in the projects I’ve told you about; he has got the old man’s consent to borrow money on the property.  Now Vawdrey, naturally enough, would like Sutherland to join him in starting a company; the thoughts of such men run only on companies.  So he offers, if I will go out to the Bahamas for a month or two, and look about me, and put myself in a position to make some kind of report—­he offers to pay my expenses.  Of course if the idea came to anything, and a company got floated, I should have shares.’