“I shall be very pleased,” said Buffy.
“It’d be only fair; and you’re not only my oldest friend, you’re my only one, nowadays. And, you know, I’ll keep those rooms in St. James’s Place. They feel part of me; and I’ll buy the house, if they’ll sell it. You’d take the rooms below mine, wouldn’t you?”
“There’s nothing against it,” said Buffy.
“Now,” said Peter Blagden, suddenly rising and walking up and down the room with his hands clasped behind his back and his head bent, “what’s to be done with the bulk of it? I’ve never yet heard of anything being done with a lump like that that didn’t bring disaster to all concerned. How can one give big money and not give a curse with it? I must think it out.”
And next day in Southampton, looking over one advertised boat and another, he would suddenly break in with that sentence which became a refrain of his: “I must think it out.”
And during the weeks of their cruise, on into the Mediterranean spring, in one passage of talk after another, the phrase would crop up. It had become his habit; if he had had a larger circle would have become a jest: “I must think it out ... I must think it out.”
But he is still thinking.
THE END