Page:E Nesbit - Man and Maid (1906).djvu/215

 “; married by the 30th of June, introduce my wife to the tenants on Christmas Eve, or no fortune. That was my uncle’s last and worst joke; he was reputed a funny man in his time. The alternatives are pretty ghastly either way.”

“Doesn’t that rather depend?” Sylvia queried, with a swift blue glance from under veiling lashes.

Michael answered her with a look, the male counterpart of her own, from dark Devon eyes, the upper lid arched in a perfect semicircle over pure grey. “Yes; but my wife must have a hundred a year of her own in Consols, to protect me from fortune-hunters—lone, lorn lamb that I am!”

Sylvia emphasised the sigh with which she admitted her indigence. Her pretty eyebrows owned plaintively that she, a struggling artist, had no claim against the nation.