“Sweet of you to say that, Georgie,” said she, giving another twirl to the spit. (There had been a leg of mutton roasted on it last May-day, while they all sat round in jerkins and stomachers and hose, and all the perfumes of Arabia had hardly sufficed to quell the odour of roast meat which had pervaded the room for weeks afterward.) “Sweet of you to say that, but you mustn’t think that I am deserting Riseholme. We should be in London perhaps (though, as I say, nothing is settled) for two or three months in the summer, and always come here for week-ends, and perhaps from November till Christmas, and a little while in the spring. And then Riseholme would always be coming up to us. Five spare bedrooms, I believe, and one of them quite a little suite with a bathroom and sitting-room attached. No, dear Georgie, I would never desert my dear Riseholme. If it was a choice between London and Riseholme, I should not hesitate in my choice.” “Then would you keep both houses open?” asked Georgie, thrilled to the marrow. “Pepino thought we could manage it,” she said, utterly erasing the impression of the shattered nephew. “He was calculating it out last night, and with board wages at the other house, if you understand, and vegetables from the country, he thought that with care we could live well within our means. He got quite excited about it, and I heard him walking about long after I had gone to bed. Pepino has such a head for detail. He intends to keep a complete set of things, clothes and sponge and everything in London, so that he will have no luggage. Such a saving of tips and small expenses, in which as he so truly says, money leaks away. Then there will be no garage expenses in London: we shall leave the motor here, and rough it with tubes and taxis in town.” Georgie was fully as excited as Pepino, and could not be discreet any longer. “Tell me,” he said, “how much do you think it will all come to? The money he’ll come into, I mean.” Lucia also threw discretion to the winds, and forgot all about the fact that they were to be so terribly poor for a long time. “About three thousand a year, Pepino imagines, when everything is paid. Our income will be doubled, in fact.” Georgie gave a sigh of pure satisfaction. So much was revealed, not only of the future, but of the past, for no one hitherto had known what their income was. And how clever of Robert Quantock to have made so accurate a guess! “It’s too wonderful for you,” he said. “And I know you’ll spend it beautifully. I had been thinking over it this afternoon, but I never thought it would be as much as that. And then there are the pearls. I do congratulate you.” Lucia suddenly felt that she had shown too much of the silver (or was it gold?) lining to the cloud of affliction that had overshadowed her. “Poor Auntie!” she said. “We don’t forget her through it all. We hoped she might have been spared us a little longer.”