en given or promised, made it more difficult--had
been intended, perhaps, to make it more difficult? Well, he could but say
his No and depart, expressing his gratitude--and insisting on the payment
of his score!

But--depart where? The energies of renewed health were pulsing through
him, and yet he had seldom felt more stranded, or, except in connection
with the gems, more insignificant, either to himself or others; in
spite of this palace which had been oddly renovated for his convenience.
His uncle's death had left him singularly forlorn, deprived of the only
home he had ever possessed, and the only person who felt for him a close
and spontaneous affection. For his other uncle--his only remaining
relation--was a crusty and selfish widower, with whom he had been on
little more than formal terms. The rheumatic gout pleaded in the letter
to Undershaw had been, he was certain, a mere excuse.

Well--something must be done; some fresh path opened up. He had in
Fact left London in a kind of secret exasperation with himself and
circumstance, making an excuse out of meeting the Ransoms--mere
acquaintances--at Liverpool; and determined, after the short tour to
which they had invited him, to plunge himself for a week or two in the
depths of a Highland glen where he might fish and think.

The Ransoms, machine manufacturers from St. Louis, had made matters
worse. Such wealth!--such careless, vulgar, easily gotten wealth!--heaped
up by means that seemed to the outsider so facile, and were, in truth,
for all but a small minority, so difficult. A commonplace man and a
frivolous woman; yet possessed, through their mere money, of a power over
life and its experiences, such as he, Faversham, might strive for all his
days and never come near. It might be said of course--Herbert Ransom
would probably say it--that all men are worth the wages they get; with an
obvious deduction in his own case. But when or where had he ever _got his
chance_--a real chance? Visions of the rich men among his acquaintance,
sleek, half-breed financiers, idle, conceited youths of the "classes,"
pushed on by family interest; pig-headed manufacturers, inheritors of
fortunes they could never have made; the fatteners on colonial land and
railway speculation--his whole mind rose in angry revolt against the
notion that he could not have done, personally, as well as any of them,
had there only been the initial shove, the favourable moment.

* * *