“What’s the matter with you?  Do you suppose I’m ill?”

“Oh no, of course not.”

“No.  I’m just lying here to rest and get up my strength again; God willing.  But in case anything should happen to me, Keith, I want you to be clear as to how you stand.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Keith cheerfully.

“It’s not all right.  It’s not as I meant it to be.  Between you and me, my big house hasn’t come to much.  I think if you’d stayed in it—­well—­we won’t say any more about that.  But Paternoster Row—­now—­that’s sound.  Mrs. Rickman always ’ad a fancy for the City ’ouse, and she’s put money into it.  You’ll have your share that was settled on you when I married your poor mother.  You stick to the City ’ouse, Keith, and it’ll bring you in something some day.  And the Name’ll still go on.”  It was pathetic, his persistent clinging to the immortality of his name.  Pathetic, too, his inability to see it otherwise than as blazoned for ever and ever over a shop-front.  His son’s fame (if he ever achieved it) was a mere subsidiary glory.  “But Pilkington’ll get the Strand ’ouse.  Whatever I do I can’t save it.  I don’t mind owning now, the Strand ’ouse was a mistake.”

“A very great mistake.”

“And Pilkington’ll get the ’Arden library.”

“You don’t know.  You may get rid of him—­before that time.”

Isaac seemed to be torn by his thoughts the more because they found no expression in his face that was bound, mouth, eye, and eyelid in its own agony.  Before what time?  Before the day of his death, or the day of redemption?  “The mortgage,” he said, “’as still three years to run.  But I can’t raise the money.”

Keith was silent.  He hardly liked to ask, though he would have given a great deal to know, the amount of the sum his father could not raise.  A possibility, a splendid, undreamed of possibility, had risen up before him; but he turned away from it; it was infamous to entertain it, for it depended on his father’s death.  And yet for the life of him he could not help wondering whether the share which would ultimately come to him would by any chance cover that mortgage.  To be any good it would have to come before the three years were up, though—­He put the splendid horrible thought aside.  He could not contemplate it.  The wish was certainly not the father of that thought.  But supposing the thought became the father of a wish?

“That reminds me,” said Isaac, “that there was something else I ’ad to say to you.”

He did not say it all at once.  At the very thought of it his swollen tongue moved impotently without words.  At last he got it out.

“I’ve been thinking it over—­that affair of the library.  And I’ve been led to see that what I did was wrong.  Wrong, I mean, in the sight of God.”

There was a sense he could not get rid of, in which it might still be considered superlatively right.