"Oh I know there are two"—our young man had coloured. "I don't mean different ones, but copies of the same," he explained; "one of which Mr. Crick must have."
"And the other of which"—Horton pieced it together—"is the one you offer to show me?"
"Unless, unless——!" and Gray, casting about, bethought himself. "Unless that one——!" With his eyes on his friend's he still shamelessly wondered.
"Unless that one has happened to get lost," Horton tenderly suggested, "so that you can't after all produce it?"
"No, but it may be upstairs, upstairs——" Gray continued to turn this over. "I think it is," he then recognised, "where I had perhaps better not just now disturb it."
His recognition was nothing, apparently, however, to the clear quickness of Horton's. "It's in your uncle's own room?"
"The room," Gray assented, "where he lies in death while we talk here." This, his tone suggested, sufficiently enjoined delay.
Horton's concurrence was immediately such that, once more turning off, he measured, for the intensity of it, half the room. "I can't advise you without the facts that you're unable to give," he said as he came back, "but I don't indeed invite you to go and rummage in that presence." He might have exhaled the faintest irony, save that verily by this time, between these friends—by which I mean of course as from one of them only, the more generally assured, to the other—irony would, to an at all exhaustive analysis, have been felt to flicker in their medium. Gray might in fact, on the evidence of his next words, have found it just distinguishable.
V
"We do talk here while he lies in death"—they had in fine all serenity for it. "But the extraordinary thing is that my putting myself this way at my ease—and for that matter putting you at yours—is exactly what the dear man made to me the greatest point of. I haven't the shade of a sense, and don't think I ever shall have, of not doing what he wanted of me; for what he wanted of me," our particular friend continued, "is—well, so utterly unconventional. He would like my being the right sort of well-meaning idiot that you catch me in the very fact of. I warned him, I sincerely, passionately warned him, that I'm not fit, in the smallest degree, for the use, for the care, for even the most rudimentary comprehension, of a fortune; and that exactly it was which seemed most to settle him. He wanted me clear, to the last degree, not only of the financial brain, but of any sort of faint germ of the money-sense whatever—down to the very lack of power, if he might be so happy (or if I might!) to count up to ten on my fingers. Satisfied of the limits of my arithmetic he passed away in bliss."