He kissed her good-night, and as she smiled back at him from the hall and told him she wouldn’t worry if he’d get some sleep, he went on: “Why, they haven’t any more chance to get Ornaby away from me than they have to—than they have to”—he paused, searching for a sufficient comparison, and, finding it, finished with cheery explosiveness—“than they have to get Henry Daniel Oliphant himself away from me!”
Upon this she went to her own door down the hall, where she nodded and whispered back to him a smiling good-night, and disappeared, glad to see him so abundantly recovered from his brief depression. “Somehow I believe he _will_ manage to keep on going, even this time,” she told her husband. “He’s so sure failure’s an absolute impossibility that I do think maybe——”
“No, I don’t see even a ‘maybe’ in it for him,” Mr. Oliphant said, and shook his head. “Not _this_ time, I’m afraid.”
But the Earl of Ornaby was in the field by sunrise the next morning, and armoured in convictions so strong that he began the day with plans, not for the retention of the threatened domain, but for an extension of it; he went to see a farmer who owned sixty acres north of Ornaby and got an option on them before keeping his appointment with a contractor to select a site for the airily projected automobile factory.
Not until the afternoon did he go downtown to see about raising a little money on a note to fend off the impending foreclosure; and he was still undiscouraged when he came home that evening without having succeeded. There were thirteen long days left, he told his mother, in the hall near the front door, where she met him when he came in; and she responded sunnily that thirteen was a lucky number, then gave him a note of a kind different from the one he had spent the afternoon trying to negotiate.
“You see I was right,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you she’d understand? Their housemaid brought it in this morning after breakfast.”
We’re in such a rush of packing I won’t have time to come in and say good-bye, as I’d like to. Papa has to go to New York, and I’ve decided I ought to go with him, because there are so many automobiles there now, and he hasn’t learned that they’re getting even worse than the bicycle “speeders” about running over people.