Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/44

 were one; but I'll be hanged if I see my way. My adventures are all in a very small circle"—and our young man tapped the seat of his brain. He thought it out at the moment almost as much for himself as for Aurora. "If it weren't that I'm trying to equip myself without disgrace in this one, I should doubt if in a fix of the kind that for you makes the hero I could be rightly counted on to know what to do. There you have me. Yes, it comes home to me: I only know what to do in thought or, as you might say, imagination—and but the least little bit even there; also without any firm confidence of doing it. So that if none but a ranchman need apply!" he could in fine, while they dropped, with this, into their longest break, but look about for his hat. "I suppose it's no use my saying," he went on when he had found this article, "that if it interests you at all I may just possibly before long come in for something in England." He waited a little for her to take him up on it, but to the simple increase of his sense of her leaving him now to flounder as he would. He floundered accordingly an instant longer. "To me—to my mind of course I mean—such a windfall, in the shape of a bit of old property, an old house, a piece of suggestive concrete antiquity, easily represents, as you can conceive, rather a 'treat.' But I don't dream it's a thing to dazzle you with." He felt as soon as he had spoken, or rather as soon as her own 30