"If you don't want to go back to your aunt, that'll be better than a
boarding house, won't it? You pay the girls out of this, and I'll look
after the other bills. There's a good fellow. Now, then what's No. 18?"
I fingered with an odd reluctance the little roll of bills he handed me,
though it was like a life buoy to a drowning sailor.
"You'd better," he said, with quiet decision, cutting short my hesitation.
"The girls won't need to know where it comes from, or that I know anything
about it. It's ever so much nicer that way, don't you think?"
I put the money with my pride into my pocket, and continued sorting out
bills from the rubbish. In all we scheduled over forty before we gave it
up. Besides the Van Nostrand painting and one or two accounts that
probably escaped us, I found that I owed between $4,000 and $5,000.
"That is the whole of my dowry, John," I said.
"I would as willingly accept you as a portionless bride," he declaimed in
theatrical fashion; and then we both broke into hysterical laughter.
"Never mind," he said, at last, wiping his eyes. "I never dreamed that all
this rubbish about you could cost so much; I ought to have had my eyes
open.
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