“And you?” she asked.
“My only day of the week is Sunday, Honora. You know that. And I wouldn't spend another day at Silverdale if they gave me a deed to the property,” he declared.
On the train, when Howard had returned from the smoking car and they were about to disembark at Long Island City, they encountered Mr. Trixton Brent.
“Whither away?” he cried in apparent astonishment. “Up at dawn, and the eight o'clock train!”
“We were going to look at a house,” explained Honora, “and Howard has no other time.”
“I'll go, too,” declared Mr. Brent, promptly. “You mightn't think me a judge of houses, but I am. I've lived in so many bad ones that I know a good one when I see it now.”
“Honora has got a wild notion into her head that I'm going to take the Farnham house,” said Howard, smiling. There, on the deck of the ferryboat, in the flooding sunlight, the idea seemed to give him amusement. With the morning light Pharaoh must have hardened his heart.
“Well, perhaps you are,” said Mr. Brent, conveying to Honora his delight in the situation by a scarcely perceptible wink. “I shouldn't like to take the other end of the bet. Why shouldn't you? You're fat and healthy and making money faster than you can gather it in.”
Howard coughed, and laughed a little, uncomfortably. Trixton Brent was not a man to offend.
“Honora has got that delusion, too,” he replied. He steeled himself in his usual manner for the ordeal to come by smoking a cigarette, for the arrival of such a powerful ally on his wife's side lent a different aspect to the situation.