It was, though it had been built and upholstered to order regardless of cost. Still there was a certain comfort in the dull red flock of its walls, the dull red fleece of its floors, and when once you reached it, the fire lit up the marvellous expanse of priceless tiles, and steel, and ormulu, and bronze, cheerfully enough.
"Don't try and sit on any of those chairs," said Ned, "they're screwed to their places, I believe. Here's a basket one of mine; and will you pour out tea?"
Yet it was pleasant enough sitting there by the fire in the growing dusk, and Ned's heart gave a great throb as he thought of Aura in her blue smock walking unconcernedly over the priceless pile carpets as if they had been Kidderminster. And she would be right. When she was there all other things sank into insignificance.
"It's terribly big," said Helen. "You ought to marry, Ned."
"I suppose I ought," he replied solemnly, but his thoughts were simply running riot over the suggestion; "it is too big for one."
And then he saw a vision of a blue smock held confidingly by a little toddling child, and something in him seemed to rise up and choke him, so that he had to get up, and walk away from his cousin's curious eyes. So to change the subject he began hurriedly--
"I didn't tell you, did I, about that old man I met in the desert--right away from everybody? I don't believe he was real, but he was a wonder. If you talked Herbert Spencer with him he replied with Nietzsche. There wasn't anything he didn't seem to know, and that he hadn't dismissed as not worth knowing. And yet he knew nothing. If you hurled an example at him he was floored. It was all pure thought. He never did anything else but think. You see he was one of their holiest men, and he had sat in the same place for fifty years."
"You have been back to India, Ned," she exclaimed, "you know you have; and I sent all my letters to Algiers."
He came over to her and sat on the arm of her chair, as he used to do when he was a boy.
"They were forwarded--at intervals," he remarked coolly. "Have you never, Nell, wanted to run away for a bit and find yourself naked, out in the open?" And then, airily, he began to hum that graceless ditty of young subalterns at Pekin when the Embassy had been relieved and the Summer Palace occupied, and the allied army amused itself with burlesques on the vanished foe: