“And we need them all,” said the elder man. “This office life is one eternal grind, month after month, year after year. But I don’t wish to complain. I suppose all men get ‘hypped’ sometimes.”
“I never do,” laughed Hubert; “the day’s never long enough for me; but I suppose I soon should if I lived all the year round in town. It’s being so much in the open air that saves one. But why don’t you clear out to Windāhgil for a change? Come home with me. The governor and my mother are always expecting you to send them word you’re coming.”
“I wish to heaven I could,” said the man of the city, looking enviously at Hubert’s cheery countenance and unworn features; “but I can’t find the time at present. However, I promise to turn up at Mooramah—isn’t that your railway town?—some time before Christmas. I shall count the days till I can, I assure you.”
“I shall be away then, I am sorry to say,” said Hubert. “I should like to have taken you all over the old place. There are one or two decent views, and rides and drives no end. However, the girls and the young brothers know them as well as I do; you must get them to do the honours. Oh! I forgot, too—you can drive them over to the Dacres’. But you mustn’t put it off too long. Still, they can’t be ruined within a year or eighteen months, anyhow.”
“And perhaps not then,” said Mr. Hope, with a smile. “Friends might intervene judiciously, you know. It won’t be Mr. Dealerson’s fault if they pull through, however.”
“No, hang him! However, there must be Dealersons in the world, I suppose. They act as a kind of foil to honest men, and serve as transparencies to show roguery in all its glory. Well, good-bye till then. We may meet before Delamere and I start for the ‘Never-Never’ country.”
When Hubert Stamford beheld his sisters and his younger brother, who had driven to Mooramah to meet him, he felt more like a stranger and pilgrim than he ever expected to feel in that familiar spot. He was there with them, but not of them, as it were. He was to stay a month or so at Windāhgil—only a month at the dear old place where he had lived ever since he could remember anything; he was to go over all the familiar scenes once more, and then—to leave it, certainly for years, perhaps for ever. After the first warm greeting the girls looked inquiringly at him; the tears came into Laura’s eyes. “Oh, how happy we are to see you, our own dear Hubert; but to think you are going away so soon nearly breaks my heart!” she said.
“He looks wonderfully well. Town life—not too much—always refines people,” said Linda, with an air of tender criticism; “but I think there’s a hard look about his eyes. I suppose it’s making up his mind to this grand new speculation.”
“You see exactly the same Hubert Stamford that went away, you little analysing duffer, but is it my fault that I have had to move with the rest of the world? Do you want me to stay at home and become a superior sort of ‘cockatoo,’ and are you and Laura—if it is to come to that—prepared to remain at Windāhgil for the rest of your lives?”