"I only said that I would be happy to go back," came the far voice.
Quick, unconsidered words trembled on his lips for utterance; perhaps fear of undoing what had been done restrained him.
"Not as happy as I will be to see you," he said, with an effort.
The sudden accession of high spirits filled him with delightful impatience. He ranged the house restlessly, traversing the hallway and silent rooms. A happy inclination for miscellaneous conversation impelled him to long-deferred interviews with people on the place. He talked business to Mrs. Quant, to Michael, the armourer; he put on snow-shoes and went cross lots to talk to his deaf head-farmer, Vail. Then he came back and set himself resolutely to his accounts; and after dinner he wrote letters, a yellow pup dozing on his lap, a cat purring on his desk, and occasionally patting with tentative paw the letter-paper when it rustled.
A mania for cleaning up matters which had accumulated took possession of him--and it all seemed to concern, in some occult fashion, the coming of Jacqueline on the morrow--as though he wished to begin again with a clean slate and a conscience undisturbed. But what he was to begin he did not specify to himself.
Bills--heavy ones--he paid lightly, drawing check after check to cover necessities or extravagances, going straight through the long list of liabilities incurred from top to bottom.
Later, the total troubled him, and he made himself do a thing to which he was averse--balance his check-book. The result dismayed him, and he sat for a while eyeing the sheets of carelessly scratched figures, and stroking the yellow pup on his knees.
"What do I want with all these clubs and things?" he said impatiently. "I never use 'em."
On the spur of impulse, he began to write resignations, wholesale, ridding himself of all kinds of incumbrances--shooting clubs in Virginia and Georgia and North Carolina, to which he had paid dues and assessments for years, and to which he had never been; fishing clubs in Maine and Canada and Nova Scotia and California; New York clubs, including the Cataract, the Old Fort, the Palisades, the Cap and Bells, keeping only the three clubs to which men of his sort are supposed to belong--the Patroons, the Olympian, and his college club. But everything else went--yacht clubs, riding clubs, golf clubs, country clubs of every sort--everything except his membership in those civic, educational, artistic, and charitable associations to which such New York families as his owed a moral and perpetual tribute.