Page:The Ivory Tower (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/219

THE IVORY TOWER His recognition was nothing, apparently, however, to the clear quickness of Morton's. "It's in your uncle's own room?"

"The room," Gray assented, "where he lies in death while we talk here." This, his tone suggested, sufficiently enjoined delay.

Morton's concurrence was immediately such that, once more turning off, he measured, for the intensity of it, half the room. "I can't advise you without the facts that you're unable to give," he said as he came back, "but I don't indeed invite you to go and rummage in that presence." He might have exhaled the faintest irony, save that verily by this time, between these friends—by which I mean of course as from one of them only, the more generally assured, to the other—irony would, to an at all exhaustive analysis, have been felt to flicker in their medium. Gray might in fact, on the evidence of his next words, have found it just distinguishable.

 V

"We do talk here while he lies in death"—they had in fine all serenity for it. "But the extraordinary thing is that my putting myself this way at my ease—and for that matter putting you at yours—is exactly what the dear man made to me the greatest point of. I haven't the shade 205