They moved down the broad pavement, again arm in arm, breathing in slowly the new, keen air, and observing in a silence which was full of tacit comment the beautiful termination of the street before them: the dark figures of the Crimean monument standing in grim relief against the morning light, the stately palace beyond, with its formal portals of club buildings, its embowered statues, its huge column towering ponderously above the pale green of spring in the park—all gray and cool and, as it were, thoughtfully solemn in the hush of daybreak.
“Ah, yes—this wonderful London!” sighed Christian, as they halted at the Continental corner. He spread his hand to embrace the prospect before them. “How right you were! I have not learned to know it at all. But I begin now! If you will walk through the square with me—there is something I wish to say.”
This something did not get itself said till they halted within this somber, slate-colored square. Christian paused before a big, pretentious house of gloomy, and even forbidding aspect—a front of sooty stucco, with cornices of ashen-hued stone, and many windows masked with sullen brown shades.
“This was our town house a hundred years ago,” he said meditatively. “My father was born here. My grandfather sold it when the entail was broken. Until this afternoon, it was my fixed resolve to buy it back again. I said always to myself: ‘If I am to have a house in London, it must be this old one of ours in St. James’s.’ But that is all changed now. At least, it is no longer a resolve.”
Dicky gazed at him with sleepy eyes. “How do you mean?” he asked, perfunctorily.
“Wake up now, and I will tell you!” Christian, with a lingering glance, as of renunciation, at the mansion, began to walk again. “This is it. You said you were eager to be some colonial official’s secretary—to have three hundred pounds—and the yellow fever. To obtain this, you expend all your energies, you and your relations. Well, then—why will you not be my secretary instead? You shall have more than three hundred pounds—and no yellow fever.”
Westland had roused himself, and looked inquiringly now into the other’s face. “What do you need of a secretary?” he objected, half jestingly. “If you want to talk about it after you’ve come into the thing—I don’t say that I shouldn’t be glad-to consider it. But the deuce of it is——”
“No—I wish it to begin now, this morning, this hour—this minute!” Christian spoke peremptorily.
Dicky, pondering, shook his head. “No, you mustn’t insist on settling anything now,” he decided. “It isn’t regular, you know. If you—really—want to propose something immediate—why, I’ll call and talk with you to-morrow—or, that is to say, this afternoon. But I couldn’t possibly let you commit yourself to anything of that sort now.”
Christian frowned at his friend. “You speak of what you will let me do!” he said.