And she looked at me in the prettiest and most innocent way possible, and said quite calmly and slowly--'A rich marriage.' And my heart gave a great dunt in my side, for I knew it was all over.

'Then you won't marry _me_ ?'--I said--'for I'm only a poor journalist.

But I mean to be famous some day!' 'Do you ?' she said, and again that little laugh of hers rippled out like the tinkle of cold water--'Don't you think famous men are very tiresome?
And they're always dreadfully poor!' Then I took hold of her hands, like the desperate fool I was, and kissed them, and said, 'Lucy, wait for me just a few years! Wait for me! You're so young'-- for she was only seventeen, and still at school in Brighton somewhere--'You can afford to wait,--give me a chance!' And she looked down at the water--we were 'on the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond,' as the song says--in quite a picturesque little attitude of reflection, and sighed ever so prettily, and said--'I can't, Angus! You're very nice and kind!--and I like you very much!--but I am going to marry a millionaire!' Now you know why I hate millionaires." "Did you say her name was Lucy ?" asked Helmsley.
"Yes.

Lucy Sorrel." A bright flame leaped up in the fire and showed all three faces to one another--Mary's face, with its quietly absorbed expression of attentive interest--Reay's strongly moulded features, just now somewhat sternly shadowed by bitter memories--and Helmsley's thin, worn, delicately intellectual countenance, which in the brilliant rosy light flung upon it by the fire-glow, was like a fine waxen mask, impenetrable in its unmoved austerity and calm.

Not so much as the faintest flicker of emotion crossed it at the mention of the name of the woman he knew so well,--the surprise he felt inwardly was not apparent outwardly, and he heard the remainder of Reay's narration with the most perfectly controlled imperturbability of demeanour.
"She told me then," proceeded Reay--"that her parents had spent nearly all they had upon her education, in order to fit her for a position as the wife of a rich man--and that she would have to do her best to 'catch'-- that's the way she put it--to 'catch' this rich man as soon as she got a good opportunity.