"I don't dare to hope. I am inclined to wait a little."
"That would be all very well for a woman," she said, "but it won't do for a man. It is a woman's part to sit at home and wait for the luck. But it is a man's to go and seek it."
"I am on the lookout for it. I am always on the lookout for it," he said.
Some shadow passed across the brightness of Evie's eyes; again the personal note had been a little too distinct in her speech, and she replied quickly:
"That is right. I should go for the highest if I were you. I think I should plot a revolution, and make myself King of England. Something big of that sort!"
"I had not thought of that," said Harry; "and I sometimes wonder--it is all nonsense, you know, about the Luck, and of course I don't really believe in it--but I sometimes wonder----"
"I wonder whether you would care to hear some more family history?" he said at length.
"Is it as exciting as the Luck?" asked the girl.
"I don't know if you will find it so. It is certainly more tragic."
"Promise me to exercise your right of stopping me, as before."
"No. I meant that you had the right to," he said. "Do you really want to hear it? It is intimate stuff."
Harry paused a moment, then began his story.
"There lives at Vail," he said, "a man whom I honour as much as any one in the world, my great-uncle, Francis Vail. He is old, he has led the most unhappy life, yet, if you met him casually, you would say he was a man who had never seen sorrow, so cheerful is he, so full of kindly spirits."
"He is your only relation, is he not?" asked the girl.
"Lady Oxted. I beg your pardon. I did not mean to interrupt."
"He has led a life of continuous and most unmerited misfortune," said Harry, "and when I began just now 'I wonder,' I was going to say, I wonder whether the Luck will come to him? You see it is a family thing. He, one would think, might get the good, not I. And I honestly assure you that I should be more than delighted if he did."
"It is about him you would tell me?" asked Evie.
"About him. I need not give you the smaller details. His unhappy marriage, his sudden poverty, his bankruptcy even, for there is one thing in his life so terrible that it seems to me to overshadow everything else."