“Sit down, won’t you?” Bluecaster said. “Dennison will be some little time yet. You look thoroughly done up.”
Lanty took the chair opposite. They were both tired out, but there were things yet to be said, things that might never be possible, perhaps, on any other day but this.
“I spoke for us both, my lord. If I took too much on myself——”
Bluecaster lifted a hand.
“You have always had to take everything. It isn’t the first time. I have never helped you. Do you think I don’t know it?”
“That’s not true!” Lanty answered warmly. “How could I achieve anything without your consent? In the end, everything comes to you, and you’ve never hindered. There’s no better landlord in the kingdom.”
“It’s easy to be kind without lifting a finger; easy to agree to a judgment you know to be right; but there’s a final responsibility that is mine and mine only, and that I’ve never faced. In this matter of the Lugg, for instance——”
There came to Lanty a memory of the meeting at which, with a single look, Bluecaster had passed the fate of the bank into his hands.
“Of course you couldn’t know!” he exclaimed incredulously. “That’s only Brack’s raving. But”—he stopped suddenly, stared, stammering and half-rising—“you don’t mean that you agreed with him, thought the Lugg ought to go—did not trust it, all the time?”