“I must be getting back to my little girl. Promise me you’ll be off to bed soon, and not stop the night here, fretting and thinking. And for Heaven’s sake get out of those sopping clothes! No—don’t come with me. Dandy’ll understand. Cyril came over for a word with you—did you know?—but he thought he’d better not bother you to-night. And Mother sent her love. Save us! I’d have caught it if I’d forgotten that! You’ll look us up, sometime?”
“When I’ve made my world over again.”
“Lancaster”—the words came hesitatingly, almost as if the speaker wondered at himself and them—“there’s one thing I envy you, anyway! I’m just a plain business-man who’s never run up against much except money that everybody else doesn’t taste equal, but you and your father between you have had something bigger and grander than comes to most folk, something that sets you near alongside the gods. They say old Whinnerah stuck it out because of you both, though Brack went to fetch him. For how many of us others, I wonder, would a man die to prove our pledged word?”
Before he went upstairs, Lanty opened the door and called to Helwise, still purring over her prospects. She rose startled, and came fearfully. He was standing by the table, and upon it the Gazette lay wide. The whole world might see it now.
“I hope you haven’t waited up for me,” he said, quite gently. “I just wanted to tell you that I should like those cuttings in a book, after all. I should be grateful if you would finish them for me.”
The tears rushed back to her eyes.
“I didn’t mean to vex you. I didn’t mean to be prying and unkind! I thought all the fine things they said about the Lugg might comfort you a little—help you——”
“They have helped me.”
“Of course I know you’ll blame yourself because those two old people got themselves drowned, and the sheep and the mangolds and everything like that, but everybody thought it was very wonderful when it was built, and admired your father and said he had such a good leg! He was ever so proud of that photograph when it came out.”
“I am proud of it, too,” Lanty said, leaning over the paper. He looked long from his father’s face to that of Wolf behind. It was hard to think that both were dead—men of a personality that never really dies, but lives on in its effects. Taking a pen, he added a letter to the inscription below, and left the paper lying—