“Her!” said Sarah. “Do you mean——?”
“Look here, Sarah,” Sam interrupted, and used a formula which he had thought out rather carefully. “Do you imagine I’d be giving you a message like this if he hadn’t sent it?”
“Message! What message?”
Then Anne came in.
“Yes, Sarah,” she heard Sam saying with a pedagogic air. “The word clandestine means secret.” He resumed with zest the reading of his play and, though theirs was a small house, managed to avoid being alone with Madge up to church time on the morrow. He had business out that Saturday night—to make sure of George, whom he found full of panting resolution to catch the clerk and cancel the banns. The glamour of that furniture had lasted this long with George, but the awful hazard of the Sunday morning eclipsed the glow as it came nearer. George wilted at the thought of Madge rising in her place with a firm, irrevocable “I forbid the banns” upon her lips.
There had begun, too, to be a quality too much like that of an Arabian night about his visit to the Club. Sam was a wonderful boy and George granted his high superiority; but even George, the humble, did not quite see Sam as a miracle-worker. He even began to doubt the existence of the enchanted Palace which Sam had shown him, and that it was within Sam’s competence to hand over that house to him appeared now ridiculous. Sam came just in time.
“Would you care,” he said, “to have another look at your house?”
George would, but he hadn’t time then: he was going; to see the clerk, and till he saw the clerk he was a man obsessed with an idea. “I suppose,” he said sceptically, “that it’s still there?”
“Of course,” said Sam, “and has a few more things in since you saw it.”
“Well,” said George, “it’s a nice house, but I’m going to see yon clerk to tell him not to put up banns.”