It would have been unworthy to pray for death. A man has no business to whine for a speedy release because his duty has become irksome; but he was conscious of some disappointment. He had believed, when he had buried his son, that his own turn would come when the shots began to "thin". He was willing to wait till then, indeed it would never have done for his wife to have been left alone; but now, when the shops were opening again, when the world was regaining its balance, and men, meeting in the street, talked of weather and trade, and discovered that the "Last Day" was, after all, not so very imminent, the old man was conscious of a slightly surprised disappointment. "The king can do no wrong," but he had hoped things might have been otherwise ordered.
He was just turning in at his own gate one Sunday morning; the usual Sunday services had begun again, and he was considering how to fill up the gaps in the church band, when some one called him by his Christian name.
He turned, frowning slightly, and a good deal surprised; then his face changed.
He knew the stranger at once; the twelve years that lay between this and their last meeting seemed to come like a haze before his eyes. He rubbed them vigorously, but he had no doubt as to who it was.
"Deane! Charles Deane!" he cried.
"I saw it in the paper, and I came at once. My dear old friend!" cried the new-comer; and the two men grasped each other silently by the hand.
It is one of the advantages of riches that good impulses can be carried out with comparative ease, while they are still hot.
Mr. Bagshotte threw open the gate with a jerk.
"Come in, come in. You are more than welcome," he said. "To think that you should have come like this! It's—it's extraordinarily good of you, Deane."
The old man was more touched than he would have cared to show. He had admired his brilliant friend immensely in the olden days; but he had, somehow, hardly expected that Charles Deane would have remembered him.