"Must, sir," Jack Flint replied. "Leave Dover by to-night's boat—holiday. If you'd only come in sooner! I wonder now where he's been?" Flint added, with a comic expression on his good-natured face.
"No place that I wouldn't have left for an hour or two with you, old chap," said Dick in a strange tone; "nowhere very pleasant."
Nothing better could have happened to Dick just then than seeing the chum from whom he had parted nearly three years ago. It was as though his good angel had stored up for him a sovereign simple, and administered it at the moment it was most needed. In the presence of Flint he had escaped for a few minutes from the full sense of his anguish. But now, by an unlucky remark, Jack had undone his good work as unconsciously as he had effected it. Dick remembered bitterly that long ago he had told his friend all about his love—as it then stood.
"Mr. Flint has been telling us some of your adventures, which it seems we should never have heard from you," observed Fanny, reproachfully.
This was quite true. Once snubbed at Graysbrooke, his system of silence on that subject had been extended to Iris Lodge. One set of people had voted his experiences tiresome; that was enough for him. This was doubtless unfair to his family, but it was not unnatural in Dick. He was almost morbid on the point.
"Indeed!" he replied; "but suppose he gives us some of his Irish adventures instead? How many times have they tried to pot you, my unjust landlord? You must know, mother, that this is not only my ex-partner in an honourable commercial enterprise—not only 'our Mr. Flint' that used to be—but John Flint, Esq., J.P., of Castle Flint, county Kerry; certainly a landholder, and of course—it goes without saying—a tyrant."
"Really?" said Mrs. Edmonstone. "He did not tell us that."
"It's the unhappy fact," said Flint, gloomily. "A few hundred acres of hills and heather, and a barn called by courtesy 'Castle'; those are my feudal possessions. The scenery is gorgeous, but the land—is a caution!"
"Barren?" asked Dick.
"As Riverina in a drought."