And of late--ever, in fact, since he had left the floating deposit and had seen Aura--he smiled at the remembrance of her standing framed in scarlet and white, handing back the sovereign with that peremptory "Take it please!"
Why should not he and she go forth in the wilderness in their sandalled feet to forget--and to remember? That was life. To forget so much, and to remember so much that one had forgotten.
He pulled himself up after a time from the unaccustomed line of thought or reverie, telling himself it was all nonsense--sheer nonsense. Yet it was attractive.
Suddenly the words "Go! sell all that thou hast," recurred to him, making him wonder if it were a hard saying or no. For the moment he felt inclined to obey it literally.
They were halfway through dinner ere Lord Blackborough appeared at the table. To begin with he had wired to his valet for dress clothes, and, accustomed to the routine of good service, had expected to find them in his room. They were not, however, and only by the help of a tearful little Cornish maiden at whom all the racketty job servants from London were swearing profusely as she fled about trying to do everything at once, did he discover his suit-case in the servants' hall, where two lordly chauffeurs accosted him scornfully as some one's belated valet. He escaped from them--and from the cook who, solemnly drunk, was using inconceivable language to the entrée she was dishing up--only to find that his man had forgotten to put the studs in his shirt. Whereupon he also cursed as he broke his finger-nails over the job. And yet all the time at the back of his brain, the thought of Aura lingered, and in the front of it his uncle's face, so foolishly, childishly, helplessly wanting money.
What else had the old man expected but chicanery when he dabbled in the Pool. It was nothing but a clutching whirlpool of hands trying to grasp at a golden sovereign in the centre! Every one clutched, he as much as any one. Then with a jar, his mind reverted to the shade of many a tree he had seen in India, where men lived, and apparently lived happily, possessed of nothing but their souls, devoid of all things save the inevitable garment of flesh.
The shade of a Bo-tree!
This certainly was not it, he thought, as with a smiling apology he slipped into the empty place and found himself in the battle-ground of a heated discussion.
A trifle dazzling surely, these lights and flowers and fair women. Helen looked well in white at the head of the table between Mr. Hirsch and Dr. Ramsay; and, thank Heaven! she had left off weepers in the evening. What a difference there was between lace and stiff crimped muslin; and how young she looked.
The rapidity of thought is immeasurable, the velocity of its vibration untranslatable in terms of mere human flesh and blood. These thoughts and millions of others suggested by the whole entourage which in a second became part of Ned Blackborough's life-experience, passed into his mind and left him free at once to listen to his cousin's gay--