To do that would be easy.  He had only to advance by a few weeks his departure for Stoughton, Michigan, where he meant to return in any case.  It was the familiar field of those opportunities in copper which he hoped to profit by again.  Once he was on that ground, Olivia Guion and her concerns would be as much a part of a magic past as the woods and mountains of a holiday are to a man nailed down at an office desk.  With a very little explanation to Ashley he could turn his back on the whole business and give himself up to his own affairs.

He made an effort to recapture his zest in the old game, but after the passionate interest he had put into the past week the fun was out of it.  Stoughton, Michigan, presented itself as a ramshackled, filthy wooden town of bar-rooms, eating-rooms, pool-rooms, and unspeakable hotels.  The joys and excitements he had known over such deals as the buying and selling of the Catapult, the Peppermint, and the Etna mines were as flat now as the lees of yesternight’s feast.  “I’m not in love with her,” he kept saying, doggedly, to himself; and yet the thought of leaving Olivia Guion and her interests to this intrusive stranger, merely because he was supposed to have a prior claim, was sickening.  It was more sickening still that the Englishman should not only be disposed to take up all the responsibilities Davenant would be laying down, but seemed competent to do it.

On the embankment he met Rodney Temple, taking the air after his day in the Gallery of Fine Arts.  He walked slowly, with a stoop, his hands behind him.  Now and then he paused to enjoy the last tints of pink and purple and dusky saffron mirrored in the reaches of the river or to watch the swing of some college crew and the swan-like movement of their long, frail shell.

“Hello!  Where are you off to?  Home?”

Davenant had not yet raised this question with himself, but now that it was before him he saw it was worth considering.  Home, for the present, meant Drusilla and Mrs. Temple, with their intuitions and speculations, their hints and sympathies.  He scarcely knew which he dreaded most, the old lady’s inquisitive tenderness or Drusilla’s unsparing perspicacity.

“Not home just yet, sir,” he had the wit to say.  “In fact, I’m walking in to Boston, and may not be home to dinner.  Perhaps you’ll tell Mrs. Temple so when you go in.  Then I sha’n’t have to ’phone her.”

Temple let that pass.  “Been up to look at the great man?”

Peter nodded.  “Just come from there.”

“And what do you make of him?”

“Oh, he’s a decent sort.”

“Not going to back out, eh?”

“Not at all; just the other way:  he wants to step in and take everything off—­off our hands.”

“You don’t say so.  Then he’s what you say—­a decent sort.”

“He’s more than that,” Davenant heard himself saying, to his own surprise.  “He’s a fine specimen of his type, and the type itself—­”