Sylvia began whimpering softly.  “Oh, Henry, if you talk that way it will take away all my comfort!  What do you suppose the property would mean to me without you?”

Then Henry felt ashamed.  “Lord, don’t worry,” he said, roughly.  “A man can’t say anything to you without upsetting you.  I can’t tell how long I’ll live.  Sometimes a man lives through everything.  All I meant was, sometimes when good-luck comes to a man it comes so darned late it might just as well not come at all.”

“Henry, you don’t mean to be wicked and ungrateful?”

“If I am I can’t help it.  I ain’t a hypocrite, anyway.  We’ve got some good-fortune, and I’m glad of it, but I’d been enough sight gladder if it had come sooner, before bad fortune had taken away my rightful taste for it.”

“You won’t have to work in the shop any longer, Henry.”

“I don’t know whether I shall or not.  What in creation do you suppose I’m going to do all day—­sit still and suck my thumbs?”

“You can work around the place.”

“Of course I can; but there’ll be lots of time when there won’t be any work to be done—­then what?  To tell you the truth of it, Sylvia, I’ve had my nose held to the grindstone so long I don’t know as it’s in me to keep away from it and live, now.”

Henry had not been at work since Abrahama White’s death.  He had been often in Sidney Meeks’s office; only Sidney Meeks saw through Henry Whitman.  One day he laughed in his face, as the two men sat in his office, and Henry had been complaining of the lateness of his good-fortune.

“If your property has come too late, Henry,” said he, “what’s the use in keeping it?  What’s the sense of keeping property that only aggravates you because it didn’t come in your time instead of the Lord’s?  I’ll draw up a deed of gift on the spot, and Sylvia can sign it when you go home, and you can give the whole biling thing to foreign missions.  The Lord knows there’s no need for any mortal man to keep anything he doesn’t want—­unless it’s taxes, or a quick consumption, or a wife and children.  And as for those last, there doesn’t seem to be much need of that lately.  I have never seen the time since I came into the world when it was quite so hard to get things, or quite so easy to get rid of them, as it is now.  Say the word, Henry, and I’ll draw up the deed of gift.”

Henry looked confused.  His eyes fell before the lawyer’s sarcastic glance.  “You are talking tomfool nonsense,” he said, scowling.  “The property isn’t mine; it’s my wife’s.”

“Sylvia never crossed you in anything.  She’d give it up fast enough if she got it through her head how downright miserable it was making you,” returned the lawyer, maliciously.  Then Sidney relented.  There was something pathetic, even tragic, about Henry Whitman’s sheer inability to enjoy as he might once have done the good things of life, and his desperate clutch of them in flat contradiction to his words.  “Let’s drop it,” said the lawyer.  “I’m glad you have the property and can have a little ease, even if it doesn’t mean to you what it once would.  Let’s have a glass of that grape wine.”