'I—I see them,' stammered Herries, himself red as a boy. 'But you, sir? Can you get home?'
'What matters an old man like me?' cried Creighton, impatiently. 'My race is run. Be off—be off! She'll give you the slip yet; she's nearly out of sight.'
Herries hesitated a moment; his cold eyes were alight as they looked after the vanishing figure in the red pelisse.
'I'll take your advice, sir,' he said. And then he followed.
Creighton toiled up the steep ascent to his lodgings alone.
'All's well—for this time!' he was saying to himself. 'But how will it be when I am not at his elbow to allay suspicion, to soothe pride? They're ingrained in the nature of the lad. Will they lose him his happiness as they did me mine? It's likely—it's likely yet, if I know men.' He had barely breath to get up the long stone stair to his rooms, and cast himself into a chair beside the neglected hearth. He looked round the room with dull apathy of sickness, and wiped the sheer sweat from his forehead with a shaking hand.
'She—she shall have all I have to leave in this world,' he muttered. 'For the lad's sake, and for the sake of one of her sex—dead this thirty years. And for her own sake, too—a fine, a fair creature, a bonny lass!' He made as though he would reach a desk that stood near upon a table, but fell back weakly in his chair.
'Time enough yet for that, I daresay,' he said, closing his eyes.
There is often 'time enough' for the making of those wills, and yet the future finds them—unmade.
CHAPTER XXVIII.