But as he reached the stairs where they divided, he held out that friendly, welcoming, family hand again, saying:--"Thanks, Ned, it's been such an awful relief not to be thinking of money. I suppose when one comes into so much as you have, that--that you don't think of it any more?"
Was it so, Ned Blackborough wondered. Hardly; for Mr. Hirsch had millions and still thought of more. No! he personally had been tired of money for some time. _Caveat emptor_ was an excellent legal if not absolutely moral axiom; but when men allowed your millions to confuse the issue in their treatment of you, then--then one could wish the millions were not in the equation!
And of late--ever, in fact, since he had left the floating deposit and had seen Aura--he smiled at the remembrance of her standing framed in scarlet and white, handing back the sovereign with that peremptory "Take it please!"
Why should not he and she go forth in the wilderness in their sandalled feet to forget--and to remember? That was life. To forget so much, and to remember so much that one had forgotten.
He pulled himself up after a time from the unaccustomed line of thought or reverie, telling himself it was all nonsense--sheer nonsense. Yet it was attractive.
Suddenly the words "Go! sell all that thou hast," recurred to him, making him wonder if it were a hard saying or no. For the moment he felt inclined to obey it literally.
They were halfway through dinner ere Lord Blackborough appeared at the table. To begin with he had wired to his valet for dress clothes, and, accustomed to the routine of good service, had expected to find them in his room. They were not, however, and only by the help of a tearful little Cornish maiden at whom all the racketty job servants from London were swearing profusely as she fled about trying to do everything at once, did he discover his suit-case in the servants' hall, where two lordly _chauffeurs_ accosted him scornfully as some one's belated valet. He escaped from them--and from the cook who, solemnly drunk, was using inconceivable language to the _entrée_ she was dishing up--only to find that his man had forgotten to put the studs in his shirt. Whereupon he also cursed as he broke his finger-nails over the job. And yet all the time at the back of his brain, the thought of Aura lingered, and in the front of it his uncle's face, so foolishly, childishly, helplessly wanting money.