Oliver looked down rather moodily upon her.
"It's pretty easy to write charming letters when people send you money.
It would have been more to the purpose, I think, if they had taken a
little trouble to raise some themselves!"
Lady Lucy flushed.
"I don't suppose Dunscombe is a place with many rich people in it," she
said, in a voice of protest, as she passed him. Her thoughts hurt her as
she mounted the stairs. Oliver had not received her gift--for, after
all, it was a gift to him--very graciously. And the same might have been
said of various other things that she had tried to do for him during the
preceding months.
As to Marsham, while he dressed, he too recalled other checks that had
been recently paid for him, other anxious attempts that had been made to
please him. Since Diana had vanished from the scene, no complaisance, no
liberality had been too much for his mother's good-will. He had never
been so conscious of an atmosphere of money--much money. And there were
moments--what he himself would have described as morbid moments--when
it seemed to him the price of blood; when he felt himself to be a mere,
crude moral tale embodied and walking about.
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