Cluny always assumed that Gaston had had numberless tragical adventures which, if told, must make Dumas turn in his grave with envy.
Gaston smiled, and laid a hand upon the other's knee. "I'm not shell- proof, Vosse, and it was rather a narrow squeak, I'm told. But I'm kept, you see, for a worse fate and a sadder."
"I say, Belward, you don't mean that! Your eyes go so queer sometimes, that a chap doesn't know what to think. You ought to live to a hundred. You'll have to. You've got it all—"
"Oh no, my boy, I haven't got anything." He waved his hand pleasantly towards his grandfather. "I'm on the knees of the gods merely."
Cluny turned on Sir William.
"It isn't any secret, is it, sir? He gets the lot, doesn't he?"
Sir William's occasional smile came.
"I fancy there's some condition about the plate, the pictures, and the title; but I do not suppose that matters meanwhile."
He spoke half-musingly and with a little unconscious irony, and the boy, vaguely knowing that there was a cross-current somewhere, drifted.
"No, of course not; he can have fun enough without them, can't he?"