The sun came in at the window, and the long conference broke up, and, strange to say, it broke into three.  Crawley home to sleep.  Meadows to Grassmere.  Isaac Levi to smoke an Eastern pipe, and so meditate with more tranquil pulse how to strike with deadliest effect these two, his insolent enemies.

Siste viator—­and guess that riddle.

CHAPTER LXXXI.

ISAAC LEVI, rescued by George Fielding, reached his tent smarting with pain and bitter insult; he sat on the floor pale and dusty, and anathematized his adversaries in the Hebrew tongue.  Wrath still boiling in his heart, he drew out his letters and read them.  Then grief mingled with his anger.  Old Cohen, his friend and agent and coeval, was dead.  Another self dead.

Besides the hint that this gave him to set his house in order, a distinct consideration drew Isaac now to England.  He had trusted much larger interests to old Cohen than he was at all disposed to leave in the hands of Cohen’s successors, men of another generation, “progeniem vitiosiorem,” he sincerely believed.

Another letter gave him some information about Meadows that added another uneasiness to those he already felt on George’s account.  Hence his bitter disappointment when he found George gone from the mine, the date of his return uncertain.  Hence, too, the purchase of Moore’s horses, and the imploring letter to George—­measures that proved invaluable to that young man, whose primitive simplicity and wise humility led him not to question the advice of his elder, but obey it.

And so it was that, although the old Jew sailed home upon his own interests, yet during the voyage George Fielding’s assumed a great importance, direct and incidental.  Direct, because the old man was warm with gratitude to him; indirect, because he boiled over with hate of George’s most dangerous enemy.  And, as he neared the English coast, the thought that though he was coming to Farnborough he could not come home, grew bitterer and bitterer, and then that he should find his enemy and his insulter in the very house sacred by the shadows of the beloved and dead!!

Finding in Nathan a youth of no common fidelity and shrewdness, Isaac confided in him; and Nathan, proud beyond description of the confidence bestowed on him by one so honored in his tribe, enlisted in his cause with all the ardor of youth tempered by Jewish address.

Often they sat together on the deck, and the young Jewish brain and the old Jewish brain mingled and digested a course of conduct to meet every imaginable contingency; for the facts they at present possessed were only general and vague.

The first result of all this was that these two crept into the town of Farnborough at three o’clock one morning; that Isaac took out a key and unlocked the house that stood next to Meadows’ on the left hand; that Isaac took secret possession of the first floor, and Nathan open but not ostentatious possession of the ground-floor, with a tale skillfully concocted to excite no suspicion whatever that Isaac was in any way connected with his presence in the town.  Nathan, it is to be observed, had never been in Farnborough before.