The car was a recent acquisition. As Storran himself expressed it, rather bitterly: “Now that I can’t buy a ha’p’orth of happiness with the money, my luck has turned.” He explained to Gillian that after he had left England he had sold his farm in Devonshire, and that a lucky investment of the capital thus realised had turned him into a comparatively rich man.
“Even when I was making ducks and drakes of my life generally, I didn’t seem to make a mistake over money matters. If I played cards, I won; if I backed a horse, he romped in first; it I bought shares, they jumped up immediately.”
“What a pity!” replied Gillian ingenuously. “If only your financial affairs hadn’t prospered, you’d have had to settle down and work—instead of—of——”
“Playing the fool,” he supplemented. “No, I don’t suppose I should. I hadn’t learned—then—that work is the only panacea, the one big remedy.”
“And now?”
“I’ve learned a lot of things in the last two years,” quietly. “And I’m still learning.”
As the months went on, Dan’s friendship began to mean a good deal to Gillian. It had come into her life just at a time when she was intolerably lonely, and quite unconsciously she was learning to turn to him for advice on all the large and small affairs of daily life as they came cropping up.
She was infinitely glad of his counsel with regard to Coppertop, who was growing to the age when the want of a father—of a man’s broad outlook and a man’s restraining hand—became an acute lack in a boy’s life. And to Gillian, who had gallantly faced the world alone since the day when death had abruptly ended her “year of utter happiness,” it was inexpressibly sweet to be once more shielded and helped in all the big and little ways in which a man—even if he was only a staunch man-friend—can shield and help a woman.
It seemed as though Dan Storran always contrived to interpose his big person betwixt her and the sharp corners of life, and she began to wonder, with a faint, indefinable dread, what must become of their friendship when Magda returned to Friars’ Holm. Feeling as he did towards the dancer, it would be impossible for him to come there any more, and somehow a snatched hour here and there—a lunch together, or a motor-spin into the country—would be a very poor substitute for his almost daily visits to the old Queen Anne house tucked away behind its high walls at Hampstead.
Once she broached the subject to him rather diffidently.