'It was no trouble,' said Tommy generously, 'and you did it really well.'
It was no use. Airey had struggled with the secret; he had determined not to tell anybody—not to think of it or to take account of it even within himself. But it would out.
'It's all right. I happened to get a little payment to-day—one that I'd quite given up hope of ever seeing.'
'How lucky, old chap!' Tommy was content to say.
It was evident that progress would be gradual. Airey was comforting himself with the idea that he had given his dinner without encroaching on his hoard.
Yet something had been done—more than Tommy knew of, more than he could fairly have taken credit for. When Airey reached Danes Inn he found it solitary, and he found it mean. His safe and his red book were not able to comfort him. No thought of change came to him; he was far from that. He did not even challenge his mode of life or quarrel with the motive that inspired it. The usurper was still on the throne in his heart, even as Trix's usurper sat still enthroned in hers. Airey got no farther than to be sorry that the motive and the mode of life necessitated certain things and excluded others. He was not so deeply affected but that he put these repinings from him with a strong hand. Yet they recurred obstinately, and pictures, long foreign to him, rose before his eyes. He had a vision of a great joy bought at an enormous price, purchased with a pang that he at once declared would be unendurable. But the vision was there, and seemed bright.
'What a comforting thing impossibility is sometimes!' His reflections took that form as he smoked his last pipe. If all things were possible, what struggles there would be! He could never be called upon to choose between the vision and the pang. That would be spared him by the blessing of impossibility.
Rare as the act was, it could hardly be the giving of a dinner which had roused these new and strange thoughts in him. The vision borrowed form and colour from the commonest mother of visions—a woman's face.
Two or three days later Peggy Ryle brought him seven hundred pounds—because he had a safe. He said the money would be all right, and, when she had gone, stowed it away in the appointed receptacle.
'I keep my own there,' he had explained with an ironical smile, and had watched Peggy's carefully grave nod with an inward groan.