"If you will have it, it was my doing," owned General Boldero reluctantly; "and I could bite my tongue off now to think of it! But what with four of you on my hands, and the rents going down and everything else going up, I had nothing to settle--that is, I had nothing I could _conveniently_ settle, and it might have been awkward, uncommonly awkward. I could hardly have got out of it if Godfrey had expected a _quid pro quo_. And he might--he very well might. A man of his class can't be expected to understand how a man of ours has to live decently and keep up appearances while yet he hasn't a brass farthing to spare. I'll say that for Godfrey Stubbs, he seemed sensible on the point when I tried to explain; and--and somehow I was taken in and thought: 'You may be a bounder, but you are a very worthy fellow'."
He paused, and continued. "Then he suggested--it was his own idea, I give you my word for it--that we should have no greedy lawyers lining their pockets out of either of our purses. What he said was--I've as clear a recollection of it as though it were yesterday--'Oh, bother the settlement, I'll make a will leaving everything I possess to Leonore,'--and I, like a numskull, jumped at the notion. It never occurred to me that the will of a business man may be so much waste paper. His creditors can snap their fingers at any will. That's what Leonore means. She's found it out, and flies post haste to her desk to write that she must come back here."
"So she must _not_. I won't have it. The whole neighbourhood would ring with it."
"By your own showing," said Sue quietly, "in order to free yourself from the necessity of making any provision on your part when the marriage took place, you precluded----" but she got no further.
"Provision on my part?" burst forth her father, who was now himself again, and ready to browbeat anybody; "what need had the girl of any provision on my part? She was marrying a fellow with tenfold my income. The little I could have contrived to spare would have been a mere drop in the bucket to him, and I should have been ashamed to mention it. I can tell you I felt monstrous uncomfortable having to approach the subject at all; and never was more thankful than when the young man, like the decent fellow I took him then to be, pitchforked the whole business overboard."