But these agreeable influences of tea and light seemed to produce a briskening effect on the two, and their talk, which, since they came in, had touched a subject only to dismiss it, settled down into a more marked channel.
"Yes, it is a queer sort of coming-of-age party for me," said Lord Vail, "and it really was good of you to come, Geoffrey. I wonder whether any one has ever come of age in so lonely a manner. I have only one relative in the world who can be called even distantly near. He comes this evening--oh, I told you that."
"Great-uncle, to be accurate. He is my grandfather's youngest brother, and, what is so odd, he is my heir. One always thinks of heirs as being younger than one's self."
"Cut him off with a shilling," said Geoffrey.
"Well, there isn't much more in any case, except this great barrack of a house. What there is, however, goes to him. And it can hardly be expected that he will marry and have children now."
"The Lord knows! Anybody; the first person you meet if you walk down Piccadilly perhaps; perhaps you, perhaps the prime minister. Honestly, I haven't any idea."
"Marry then, at once," said Geoffrey, "and disappoint the man in the street, and the prime minister, your uncle, and me."
Harry Vail got up and stood with his back to the fire, stretching out his long-fingered hands to the blaze behind him.
"What advice!" he said. "You might as well advise me to have a Greek nose. Some people have it, some do not; it is fate."
"Marriage is a remarkably common fate," remarked Geoffrey, "commoner than a Greek nose. I have seen many married people without it."
"It is commoner for certain sorts of people," said Harry; "but you know I----" and he stopped.
"I am not of those sorts--the sorts who go smiling through the world and are smiled on in return. It was always the same with me. I am not truculent, or savage, or sulky, I believe, but somehow I remain friendless. I should be a hermit if there were any nowadays."
"Liver!" said Geoffrey decidedly. "The fellow of twenty-one who says that sort of thing about himself has got liver. 'Self-Analysis, or the Sedentary Life,' a tract by Geoffrey Langham. Here endeth the gospel."
"I don't think about my character, as a rule," he said. "I don't lead a sedentary life, and I haven't got liver. But if one is a recluse it is as well to recognise the fact. I haven't got any real friends like everybody else."