So they dallied.
"Well," said the mortgager, presently rising, "you will make up your mind and let me know, will you?"
The chance repetition of those words "make up your mind" touched Honoré Grandissime like a hot iron. He rose with the visitor.
"Well, sir, what would you give us for our title in case we should decide to part with it?"
The two men moved slowly, side by side, toward the door, and in the half-open doorway, after a little further trifling, the title was sold.
"Well, good-day," said M. Grandissime. "M. de Brahmin will arrange the papers for us to-morrow."
He turned back toward his private desk.
"And now," thought he, "I am acting without resolving. No merit; no strength of will; no clearness of purpose; no emphatic decision; nothing but a yielding to temptation."
And M. Grandissime spoke truly; but it is only whole men who so yield--yielding to the temptation to do right.
He passed into the counting-room, to M. De Brahmin, and standing there talked in an inaudible tone, leaning over the upturned spectacles of his manager, for nearly an hour. Then, saying he would go to dinner, he went out. He did not dine at home nor at the Veau-qui-tête, nor at any of the clubs; so much is known; he merely disappeared for two or three hours and was not seen again until late in the afternoon, when two or three Brahmins and Grandissimes, wandering about in search of him, met him on the levee near the head of the rue Bienville, and with an exclamation of wonder and a look of surprise at his dusty shoes, demanded to know where he had hid himself while they had been ransacking the town in search of him.