“And if you do overdraw it, Joe, I hope the bank will prosecute you!—I would, I know,” was the Squire’s last threat, as we left the bank and turned towards the Cross, Tod with a cheque-book in his pocket.
But Mr. Brandon could not be paid then. On going over to his house a day or two afterwards, we found him from home. The housekeeper thought he was on his way to one of the “water-cure establishments” in Yorkshire, she said, but he had not yet written to give his address.
“So it must wait,” remarked Tod to me, as we went home. “I’m not sorry. How the bank would have stared at having to pay a hundred pounds down on the nail! Conclude, no doubt, that I was going to the deuce headlong.”
“By Jove!” cried Tod, taking a leap in the air.
About a week had elapsed since the journey to the Old Bank, and Tod was opening a letter that had come addressed to him by the morning post.
“Johnny! will you believe it, lad? Temple asks me to be of the boating lot, after all.”
It was even so. The letter was from Slingsby Temple, written from Templemore. It stated that he had been disappointed by some of those who were to have made up the number, and if Todhetley and Ludlow would supply their places, he should be glad.
Tod turned wild. You might have thought, as Mrs. Todhetley remarked, that he had been invited to Eden.