Gladys had solemnly promised to visit her there during Lent, when, "Society is so deadly dull, you know." (A promise which she kept, making Thebes her place of retirement and meditation in preparation for her marriage after Easter.)
Braine set out on the return journey with a peculiar buoyancy of spirits which helped to drive away Helen's little regrets.
"Never mind, dear," he said, as they took their places in the palace car, "you have not seen the last of your New York friends. You shall spend winters there before you are many years older. I have only to emphasize myself in Thebes, and then we shall seek larger pastures."
"But hasn't this trip cost you a great deal of money, Ed?"
"Well, it hasn't impoverished me, at any rate," he answered, with his queer smile. "Perhaps that is because I am not altogether the paymaster."
But he did not explain.
XV.
Abner Hildreth was closeted in the parlor of his bank with a grave, but eager-faced man of perhaps fifty, who sat with his left hand doubled up into a fist, while he snapped the spaces between the knuckles with the fingers of the right, making a succession of little nervous snaps, which would have annoyed a more irritable person than Hildreth.
The banker had been reading aloud to his companion, and half a dozen copies of the Thebes Daily Enterprise lay open on a chair by his side. Hildreth had been reading the leading articles one after the other, and had just concluded, the series.