"Quite right, Hazon. You never formed a safer judgment in your life."
Then, for upwards of an hour, the pair talked together; and when the luncheon bell rang, and Laurence Stanninghame took his seat at the table along with the rest, to talk scrip in the scathingly despondent way in which the darling topic was conversationally dealt with in these days, he was conscious that he had turned the corner of a curious psychological crisis in his life.
In the afternoon he took his way down to Booyseus. Would he find Lilith in? It was almost too much good luck to hope to find her alone. As he walked, he was filled with a strange elation. The dull pain of a very near parting was largely counteracted by the manner of it. Such a parting had been before his mind for long; but then he would have gone forth broken down, ruined, more utterly without hope in life than ever. Now it was different. He was going forth upon an adventure fraught with all manner of stirring potentialities—one from which he would return wealthy, or, as his friend and thenceforth comrade had said, one from which he would not return at all.
Had his luck already begun to turn, he thought? As he mounted the stoep Lilith herself came forth to meet him. It struck him that the omen was a good one.
"Why, you are becoming quite a stranger," she said. But the note of gladness underlying the reproach did not escape him, nor a certain lighting up of her face as they clasped hands, with the subtile lingering pressure now never absent from that outwardly formal method of greeting.
"Am I?" he answered, thinking how soon, how very soon, he would become one in reality. "But you were going out?" For she had on her hat and gloves, and carried a sunshade.
"I was. You are only just in time—only just. But I won't now that you have come."
"On the contrary, I want you to. I want you to come out with me, and at once, before an irruption of bores renders that manœuvre impracticable. Will you?"
"Of course I will. Which way shall we go? Up to the town?"