"Yes, but do not be so odd, Henry; you frighten me to death with your strange ways of late."
"I have a good deal of anxiety, and perhaps am too abrupt. More of my abruptness: I can't wait another moment. Good-bye, mother."
When she found herself alone, she sat down to recover and to reflect. "Every day," she thought, "he becomes less like his old self, and more of a riddle."
"When I came in he told me he was examining that dreadful thing because he was going on a journey, and now he's gone off and left it behind him in the bag on that table. Can it be he is losing his reason?"
When Mr. Grey found himself outside the Bank-door he hailed the nearest fly, jumped in, and cried cheerily to the driver:
"Island Ferry, and I lay you a half-crown to a whip-lash you don't do it under half an hour. Take the time and drive on."
With a chuckle of grave satisfaction, the banker threw himself back in the fly, and as they drove rapidly through the town he waved his hand or doffed his hat at every twenty yards. There was cordiality in every look that greeted him, and many who saw him go by turned and gazed with admiration and envy after the fine rich jovial banker.
No wonder he looked pleased. An hour ago, less than an hour ago, he had, upon reading that note, almost come to the conclusion Sir Alexander Midharst had discovered he, Grey, had "borrowed" every penny of the immense sum confided to his charge by the baronet. Such a discovery would have been to him simply and literally fatal.
Early in this year, when he disclosed the secret of the Bank to his mother, he and it were bankrupt, and all the depositors' money was gone. Pressure after pressure had come upon him after that, and all such demands had been met by "borrowing" the baronet's savings without the baronet's consent.
Three months ago he was a bankrupt, now he was a bankrupt and a thief. He had no more right to sell those Consols than to put his hand into any customer's pocket and take his purse. He had glided into the thing gradually, beginning by borrowing twenty thousand pounds, which he caused to be lodged to his own credit at his London agents in the name of Barrington, Ware, and Duncan, an imaginary firm of Boston merchants, who remitted the money through their London agent on account of supposititious dealings in hides on the western coast of the United States.