"Good-bye, Mr. Bines."
"Good-bye, young man," Shepler shook hands with him cordially, "and the best of luck to you out there. I shall hope to hear good reports from you. And mind, you're to look us up when you're in town again. We shall always be glad to see you. Good-bye!"
He led the girl back to the case where the largest diamonds reposed chastely on their couches of royal velvet.
Percival smiled as he resumed his walk—smiled with all that bitter cynicism which only youth may feel to its full poignance. Yet, heartless as she was, he recalled that while she talked to him he had imprinted an imaginary kiss deliberately upon her full scarlet lips. And now, too, he was forced to confess that, in spite of his very certain knowledge about her, he would actually prefer to have communicated it through the recognised physical media. He laughed again, more cheerfully.
"The spring has gotten a strangle-hold on my judgment," he said to himself.
At dinner that night he had the company of that estimable German savant, the Herr Doctor von Herzlich. He did not seek to incur the experience, but the amiable doctor was so effusive and interested that he saw no way of avoiding it gracefully. Returned from his archaeological expedition to Central America, the doctor was now on his way back to Marburg.
"I pleasure much in your news," said the cheerful man over his first glass of Rhine wine with the olive in it. "You shall now, if I have misapprehended you not, develop a new strongness of the character."
Percival resigned himself to listen. He was not unfamiliar with the lot of one who dines with the learned Von Herzlich.
"Now he's off," he said to himself.
"Ach! It is but now that you shall begin to live. Is it not that while you planned the money-amassing you were deferring to live—ah, yes—until some day when you had so much more? Yes? A common thought-failure it is—a common failure of the to-take-thoughtedness of life—its capacities and the intentions of the scheme under which we survive. Ach! So few humans learn that this invitation to live specifies not the hours, like a five-o'clock. It says—so well as Father-Mother Nature has learned to write the words to our unseeing eyes—'at once,' but we ever put off the living we are invited to at once—until to-morrow-next day, next year—until this or that be done or won. So now you will find this out. Before, you would have waited for a time that never came—no matter the all-money you gathered.