“But _I_ didn’t send her,” Dan explained, since his wife clearly implied his responsibility. “You talk as if I——”
“No; but you had no right not to send _me_ after giving me your sacred——”
Dan interrupted her genially; he smiled and patted her pretty little shoulder, though it twitched away from his touch. “Lena, look here: I’ve got some big deals on, and I’m just about certain they’re goin’ to work out the right way. You see up to now the trouble’s been that all the money comin’ in had to be put right out again almost before I’d get hold of it. If it hadn’t been for that, I’d had that factory up and running long ago. But as I look ahead now, everything is mighty good—_mighty_ good! If I can just put these deals through——”
“Yes; it’s always ‘if,’” she reminded him. “When have I ever talked to you that you weren’t just about to put through some ‘mighty big deals’? You said exactly the same last year.”
“Well, but this is a better year than last year. Why, I’ve done twice the business—yes, better’n that; it’s more like four times what I did last year. If Ornaby keeps on like this, why, a few years from now——”
She stopped him; informing him that she’d long since heard more than enough about “a few years from now”; whereupon, being full of the subject, he went down to the library to tell his father and mother what was inevitable within a few years. No skepticism dampened his library prophecies now; Harlan was no longer there to listen, staring with dry incredulity through his glasses.
Harlan had not sold Mrs. Savage’s old house, but had moved into it, and kept as precise a routine there as she had kept, and with the same servants. He had two bedrooms upstairs made into a library, but changed nothing on the lower floor; and often the old lady seemed still to be there in authority. At twilight, before Nimbus lit the electric table lamp in the “south front parlour,” the room to which she had always descended from her afternoon nap, it was not difficult to imagine that she was sitting in the stiff chair beside the plate-glass window. Of course Nimbus believed that he saw her there when he came in to light the lamp; and he often mumbled to her—always upon the same theme. He was grateful for the one hundred and thirty-five dollars she had left him, but considered the sum inadequate.