“I doubt if he would have premeditated as much,” said Warming. “He was not a far-sighted man. In fact—”
“Yes?”
“We differed on that point. I stood to him somewhat in the relation of a guardian. You have probably seen enough of affairs to recognise that occasionally a certain friction—. But even if that was the case, there is a doubt whether he will ever wake. This sleep exhausts slowly, but it exhausts. Apparently he is sliding slowly, very slowly and tediously, down a long slope, if you can understand me?”
“It will be a pity to lose his surprise. There’s been a lot of change these twenty years. It’s Rip Van Winkle come real.”
“There has been a lot of change certainly,” said Warming. “And, among other changes, I have changed. I am an old man.”
Isbister hesitated, and then feigned a belated surprise. “I shouldn’t have thought it.”
“I was forty-three when his bankers—you remember you wired to his bankers—sent on to me.”
“I got their address from the cheque book in his pocket,” said Isbister.
“Well, the addition is not difficult,” said Warming.
There was another pause, and then Isbister gave way to an unavoidable curiosity. “He may go on for years yet,” he said, and had a moment of hesitation. “We have to consider that. His affairs, you know, may fall some day into the hands of—someone else, you know.”