"Leave that," she said quickly. "It can't be talked about. Have you seen Myles or Uncle Mark yet?"
"No; a proper attraction brought me here, and somehow I knew that I should find you. But I long to meet him too—your husband. It's a blessing to know that among the many who blame me he won't be counted. Please Heaven, I shall see a great deal of you both in the future. I always loved the west wind best, because it blew over Bear Down before it came to me. Sunshine ahead, I hope, and some for me. I've come home to be happy."
"Have you found a wife?"
"Honor!—No, I haven't looked for one. Godleigh's my wife. And I must set about spending some money on her, now I've got plenty. So strange—that lonely old cadet of our family. He was, I thought, as poor as a church mouse. Three parts of a miser, and lived hard and laughed at luxuries, as so many do who have had to make their own fortunes. Money-grubbing carries that curse along with it, that it often turns the grubber blind and deaf to all save the sight and clink of the hateful, necessary stuff. But the dear old boy somehow warmed to me; and I drew pictures of home for him; and he promised to come home and see me some day when he grew old. He was seventy-three then, but utterly refused to accept the fact. Then death suddenly rushed him, in the shape of a whip-snake, and dying, his thoughts turned home, and it was his wish, not my whim, that he should lie there. That put my plot into my head, for he was of the same name. Not until after his death did I know he had altered his will; and I can tell you, seeing the style he lived in and the size of his ideas, that I was staggered when I found he had left me a real fortune. That's my adventure—a mere bit of a story-book, yet a very pleasant bit to the hero of it."
Vanessa Io returned, and so still sat Honor that he settled boldly upon the sun-kissed folds of her skirt.
"Do you remember how I used to say you were all butterfly, though in grave moments you rather claimed for yourself the qualities of staid and sober twilight things—solemn beetles, whose weight of wing-case reminds them that life is real and earnest?"
"You were right upon the whole. I've got the same spirit in me as that little, gaudy, self-complacent atom there, opening and shutting his wings, like a fairy's picture-book upon your knee. Our rule of life is the same. I only hope he's having more luck with his existence than I have had with mine."
She reflected a moment. This was the first hint of his own sorrows in the past, of the price he had paid.
"But I'm not changed, for all the world of experiences that separates us," he continued quickly. "I'm only a thought older. Time is beginning to do a little gradual work in grey just above my ears. So delicate and apologetic and gentle he is that I can't grumble. Is Mr. Endicott well?"
"Very well."