"You don't know. You may get rid of him—before that time."
Isaac seemed to be torn by his thoughts the more because they found no expression in his face that was bound, mouth, eye, and eyelid in its own agony. Before what time? Before the day of his death, or the day of redemption? "The mortgage," he said, "'as still three years to run. But I can't raise the money."
Keith was silent. He hardly liked to ask, though he would have given a great deal to know, the amount of the sum his father could not raise. A possibility, a splendid, undreamed of possibility, had risen up before him; but he turned away from it; it was infamous to entertain it, for it depended on his father's death. And yet for the life of him he could not help wondering whether the share which would ultimately come to him would by any chance cover that mortgage. To be any good it would have to come before the three years were up, though—He put the splendid horrible thought aside. He could not contemplate it. The wish was certainly not the father of that thought. But supposing the thought became the father of a wish?
"That reminds me," said Isaac, "that there was something else I 'ad to say to you."
He did not say it all at once. At the very thought of it his swollen tongue moved impotently without words. At last he got it out.
"I've been thinking it over—that affair of the library. And I've been led to see that what I did was wrong. Wrong, I mean, in the sight of God."
There was a sense he could not get rid of, in which it might still be considered superlatively right.
"And wot you did—"
"Oh, never mind what I did. That's all right."
"You did the righteous and the Christian thing."