"I showed 'em that sovereign," said the bearded head, wagging again.
"Well," said Denry, "you won't forget. Six o'clock to-morrow morning."
"Ye 'd better say five," the head suggested. "Quieter like!"
"Five, then," Denry agreed.
And he departed to St. Asaph's Road burdened with a tremendous thought.
The thought was:
"I 've gone and done it this time!"
Now that the transaction was accomplished and could not be undone, he admitted to himself that he had never been more mad. He could scarcely comprehend what had led him to do that which he had done. But he obscurely imagined that his caprice for the possession of sea-going craft must somehow be the result of his singular adventure with the pantechnicon in the canal at Bursley.
He was so preoccupied with material interests as to be capable of forgetting, for a quarter of an hour at a stretch, that in all essential respects his life was wrecked, and that he had nothing to hope for save hollow worldly success. He knew that Ruth would return the ring. He could almost see the postman holding the little cardboard cube which would contain the rendered ring. He had loved, and loved tragically. (That was how he put it—in his unspoken thoughts; but the truth was merely that he had loved something too expensive.) Now the dream was done. And a man of disillusion walked along the Parade towards St. Asaph's Road among revellers, a man with a past, a man who had probed women, a man who had nothing to learn about sex. And amid all the tragedy of his heart, and all his apprehensions concerning hollow worldly success, little thoughts of absurd unimportance kept running about like clockwork mice in his head. Such as that it would be a bit of a bore to have to tell people at Bursley that his engagement, which truly had thrilled the town, was broken off. Humiliating, that! And, after all, Ruth was a glittering gem among women. Was there another girl in Bursley so smart, so effective, so truly ornate?
Then he comforted himself with the reflection, "I 'm certainly the only man that ever put an end to an engagement by just saying 'Rothschild'." This was probably true. But it did not help him to sleep.