"You did quite right to tell her, Harry," he said, "quite right. It would come to her better from you than from any one else. Also, it is far better that she should know before she came here, and before you get to know each other better. I have always a dread of the chance word, so dear to novelists, which leads to suspicion or revelations. How intolerable the fear of that would have been! We should all have been in a false position. But now she knows; we have no longer any fear as to how she may take the knowledge; and thank you, dear Harry, for telling her."
The next two or three days passed quietly and busily. There were many questions of farm and sport to be gone into, many balancings of expenditure and income to be adjusted, and their talk, at any rate, if not their more secret thoughts, was spread over a hundred necessary but superficial channels. Among such topics were a host of businesses for which Mr. Francis required Harry's sanction before he put them in hand; a long section of park paling required repair, some design of planting must be constructed in order to replace the older trees in the park, against the time that decay and rending should threaten them. All these things and many more, so submitted Mr. Francis, were desirable, but it would be well if Harry looked at certain tables of estimates which he had caused to be drawn up before he decided, as he was inclined to do, that everything his uncle recommended should be done without delay. Items, inconsiderable singly, he would find, ran to a surprising total when taken together, and he must mention a definite sum which he was prepared to spend, say, before the end of the year, on outdoor improvements. Things in the house, too, required careful consideration; the installation of the electric light, for instance, would run away with no negligible sum. How did Harry rank the urgency of indoor luxuries with regard to outdoor improvements? If he intended to entertain at all extensively during the next winter, he would no doubt be inclined to give precedence to affairs under the roof; if not, there were things out of doors which could be mended now at a less cost than their completer repair six months hence would require.
Mr. Francis put these things to his nephew with great lucidity and patient impartiality, and Harry, heavily frowning, would wrestle with figures that continually tripped and threw him, and in his mind label all these things as sordid. But the money which he could immediately afford to spend on the house and place was limited, and he had the sense to apply himself to the balancing. At length, after an ink-stained and arithmetical morning, he threw down his pen.
"Electric light throughout, Uncle Francis," he said, "and hot water laid on upstairs. There is the ultimatum. The house is more behindhand than the park. Therefore the house first."
"You see exactly what that will come to?" asked Mr. Francis.
"Yes; according to the estimates you have given me, I can afford so much, and the park palings may go to the deuce. One does not live in the park palings, and, since you mention it, I daresay I shall ask people here a good deal next winter. Let's see; this is mid-June. Let them begin as soon as Lady Oxted and Miss Aylwin have been, and they should be out of the house again by October; though the British workman always takes a longer lease than one expects. I shall want to be here in October. Oh, I wish it were October. Pheasant-shooting, you know," he added, in a tone of apology.
He tore up some sheets of figures, then looked up at his uncle.
"You will like to have people here, will you not, Uncle Francis?" he asked. "There shall be young people for you to play with, and old people for me to talk to. And we'll shoot, and, oh, lots of things."
He got off his chair, stretching himself slowly and luxuriously.
"Thank goodness, I have made up my mind," he said. "I thought I was never going to. Come out for a stroll before lunch."