He did not stop that night to see his niece. He went home, to think it over. But as he walked down Borden Street, swinging his big stick, he said to himself,—
"Next of kin! Old Marmaduke Wharne was right. But it takes more than the Family Bible to tell you which it is!"
Two days after, he had a talk with Mrs. Ledwith which relieved both their minds.
From the brown-and-apricot drawing-room,—from among the things that stood for nothing now, and had never stood for home,—he went straight up, without asking, and knocked at Desire's third-story door.
"Come in!" she said, without a note of expectation in her voice.
She had had a dull morning. Helena had brought her a novel from Loring's that she could not read. Novels, any more than life, cannot be read with very much patience, unless they touch something besides surface. Why do critics—some of them—make such short, smart work,—such cheerful, confident despatch, nowadays, of a story with religion in it, as if it were an abnormity,—a thing with sentence of death in itself, like a calf born with two heads,—that needs not their trouble, save to name it as it is? Why, that is, if religion stand for the relation of things to spirit, which I suppose it should? Somebody said that somebody had written a book made up of "spiritual struggles and strawberry short-cake." That was bright and funny; and it seemed to settle the matter; but, taking strawberry short-cake representatively, what else is human experience on earth made up of? And are novels to be pictures of human experience, or not?
This has nothing to do with present matters, however, except that Desire found nothing real in her novel, and so had flung it aside, and was sitting rather listlessly with her crochet which she never cared much for, when Uncle Oldways entered.
Her face brightened instantly as he came in. He sat down just where he had sat the other night. Mr. Oldways had a fashion of finding the same seat a second time when he had come in once; he was a man who took up most things where he left them off, and this was an unconscious sign of it.
"Your mother has decided to sell the house on the 23d, it seems," he said.
"Yes; I have been out twice. I shall be able to go away by then; I suppose that is all she has waited for."