“Whither away?” he cried in apparent astonishment.  “Up at dawn, and the eight o’clock train!”

“We were going to look at a house,” explained Honora, “and Howard has no other time.”

“I’ll go, too,” declared Mr. Brent, promptly.  “You mightn’t think me a judge of houses, but I am.  I’ve lived in so many bad ones that I know a good one when I see it now.”

“Honora has got a wild notion into her head that I’m going to take the Farnham house,” said Howard, smiling.  There, on the deck of the ferryboat, in the flooding sunlight, the idea seemed to give him amusement.  With the morning light Pharaoh must have hardened his heart.

“Well, perhaps you are,” said Mr. Brent, conveying to Honora his delight in the situation by a scarcely perceptible wink.  “I shouldn’t like to take the other end of the bet.  Why shouldn’t you?  You’re fat and healthy and making money faster than you can gather it in.”

Howard coughed, and laughed a little, uncomfortably.  Trixton Brent was not a man to offend.

“Honora has got that delusion, too,” he replied.  He steeled himself in his usual manner for the ordeal to come by smoking a cigarette, for the arrival of such a powerful ally on his wife’s side lent a different aspect to the situation.

Honora, during this colloquy, was silent.  She was a little uncomfortable, and pretended not to see Mr. Brent’s wink.

“Incredible as it may seem, I expected to have my automobile ready this morning,” he observed; “we might have gone in that.  It landed three days ago, but so far it has failed to do anything but fire off revolver shots.”

“Oh, I do wish you had it,” said Honora, relieved by the change of subject.  “To drive in one must be such a wonderful sensation.”

“I’ll let you know when it stops shooting up the garage and consents to move out,” he said.  “I’ll take you down to Quicksands in it.”

The prospective arrival of Mr. Brent’s French motor car, which was looked for daily, had indeed been one of the chief topics of conversation at Quicksands that summer.  He could appear at no lunch or dinner party without being subjected to a shower of questions as to where it was, and as many as half a dozen different women among whom was Mrs. Chandos —­declared that he had promised to bring them out from New York on the occasion of its triumphal entry into the colony.  Honora, needless to say, had betrayed no curiosity.

Neither Mr. Shorter nor Mr. Cuthbert had appeared at the real estate office when, at a little after nine o’clock; Honora asked for the keys.  And an office boy, perched on the box seat of the carriage, drove with them to the house and opened the wrought-iron gate that guarded the entrance, and the massive front door.  Honora had a sense of unreality as they entered, and told herself it was obviously ridiculous that she should aspire to such a dwelling.  Yesterday, under the spell of that somewhat adventurous excursion with Mr. Cuthbert, she had pictured herself as installed.  He had contrived somehow to give her a sense of intimacy with the people who lived thereabout—­his own friends.