The man laughed.

“Oh, he was very rich indeed!” he assured her.  “It is terrible that you should be left like this.  We will talk about it together presently, you and I. In the meantime, you must let me be your banker.”

“Dear Jerry,” she whispered, “you were always generous.”

“You have not spoken of the little prude—­dear Miss Beatrice,” he reminded her suddenly.

Elizabeth sighed.

“Beatrice was a great trial from the first,” she declared.  “You know how she disliked you both—­she was scarcely even civil to Wenham, and she would never have come to Europe with us if father hadn’t insisted upon it.  We took her down to Cornwall with us and there she became absolutely insupportable.  She was always interfering between Wenham and me and imagining the most absurd things.  One day she left us without a word of warning.  I have never seen her since.”

The man stared gloomily into his plate.

“She was a queer little thing,” he muttered.  “She was good, and she seemed to like being good.”

Elizabeth laughed, not quite pleasantly.

“You speak as though the rest of us,” she remarked, “were qualified to take orders in wickedness.”

He helped himself to more brandy.

“Think back,” he said.  “Think of those days in New York, the life we led, the wild things we did week after week, month after month, the same eternal round of turning night into day, of struggling everywhere to find new pleasures, pulling vice to pieces like children trying to find the inside of their playthings.”

“I don’t like your mood in the least,” she interrupted.

He drummed for a moment upon the tablecloth with his fingers.

“We were talking of Beatrice.  You don’t even know where she is now, then?”

“I have no idea,” Elizabeth declared.

“She was with you for long in Cornwall?” he asked.

Elizabeth toyed with her wineglass for a minute.

“She was there about a month,” she admitted.

“And she didn’t approve of the way you and Wenham behaved?” he demanded.

“Apparently not.  She left us, anyway.  She didn’t understand Wenham in the least.  I shouldn’t be surprised,” Elizabeth went on, “to hear that she was a hospital nurse, or learning typing, or a clerk in an office.  She was a young woman of gloomy ideas, although she was my sister.”

He came a little closer towards her.

“Elizabeth,” he said, “we will not talk any more about Beatrice.  We will not talk any more about anything except our two selves.”

“Are you really glad to see me again, Jerry?” she asked softly.

“You must know it, dear,” he whispered.  “You must know that I loved you always, that I adored you.  Oh, you knew it!  Don’t tell me you didn’t.  You knew it, Elizabeth!”

She looked down at the tablecloth.

“Yes, I knew it,” she admitted, softly.