‘Well, my friend,’ said Leo, ‘I am quite well aware that fighting is, as you say in England, no go; but I am bound also to allow that it is a farce in France, and that if it were ever so serious and real it is not a way to decide a question like this. However, let us try, if not to decide it at least to throw some light upon it.’ ‘Oh, that’s easy enough done, old man,’ said Lord Will. ‘You needn’t trouble yourself. She has a solicitor, I suppose, and he will have to send in all the papers to our man, and they’ll manage it between them. Of course, if our fellow has a hint that there is anything irregular he will be more particular. That’s more or less what I came for, don’t you know: to see what she had heard about old John, and so forth, and what she expected and----’ ‘What you say,’ said Leo, ‘sounds as if you meant--that you were to try whether she could be made to be content with less than her rights--with anything that it was thought well to give. I don’t suppose that is what you mean.’ ‘It’s kind of you to add that much,’ said Lord Will, who had stopped in his amusement of knocking about the balls, which he had been doing savagely, to stare in a threatening way at his friend. Then he threw down the cue and began to walk up and down the hall. ‘Swinford,’ he said after a while, coming back to the table, ‘do you know that is, I believe, exactly what I was intended to do? I knew it in a kind of a way, but I never put it into words. I believe they thought she might have been put off with a thousand pounds or two, as if it had been a legacy.’ ‘But your lawyers--I suppose they have a character to lose--would not have consented.’ ‘Oh! there’s no saying what lawyers will consent to when they’re on your side. I note what you say, about having characters to lose. I suppose you think that we--haven’t much, perhaps.’ ‘I did not mean that,’ said Leo briefly. ‘Well, perhaps you will now--but that would be a mistake. We’re none of us lawyers. Don’t you know that people sometimes take up an idea that looks quite allowable until you put it into words? Here’s a woman living quite by herself in a corner, wanting very little money. And the governor, you know, has been making her an allowance all this time. What can she want with a lot of money like that? It would only worry her, make her think, perhaps, she could set up in a different way of living, and bring her to grief in the end. And she as good as owes the family her allowance all these years, which my father wasn’t any way compelled to give. D’ye see? Well, it doesn’t sound very high-minded, I allow, but it’s very plausible. It would be no end of use to us--fifty thousand pounds, or say forty-five with five thousand or so off to her----’ ‘Oh! you mean to be so liberal as that!’