He left her quite easily, but when she tried to start to meet her husband, her knees gave way. She clung to the paling and watched him cross the bridge and stroll up the little strip of turf, still erect, contemplating the great pile in front of him with the beneficent satisfaction of inherited proprietorship. She watched him pass through the front door and disappear. Then she turned around and drew her husband into the cottage. "James," she cried, sobbing in his arms, "take me away--please take me away!" CHAPTER XXXVI During those few hours of strenuous, almost fierce work into which David threw himself after the funeral, he found in a collection of belated cablegrams which his secretary handed him an explanation of Letitia's half apology, an explanation, he told himself bitterly, of her altered demeanour towards him. The old proverb stood justified. Even this, the wildest of his speculations, had become miraculously successful. Pluto Oil shares, unsalable at a dollar a few weeks ago, now stood at eight. Oil had been discovered in extraordinary and unprecedented quantities. Oil was spurting another great fortune for him out of the sandy earth. He paused to make a calculation. The Marquis's forty thousand pounds' worth were worth, at a rough estimate, three hundred thousand. "Extraordinary news, this, Jackson," he remarked to the quiet, sad-faced young man, who had been his right hand since the time of his first railway deal. "Most extraordinary," was the quiet reply. "I congratulate you, Mr. Thain. You do seem to have the knack of turning everything you touch into gold." "Do I?" Thain murmured listlessly. "I took the liberty of investing in a small parcel of shares myself, just to lock away," the young man continued. "I gave seventy cents for them." "Not enough to make you a millionaire, I hope?" Thain asked, with some bitterness. "Enough, with my savings, to give me a very comfortable feeling of independence, sir," Jackson replied. "I have never aspired any further than that." Thain returned to his desk. He gave letter after letter, and more than once his secretary, who had received no previous intimation of his master's intended departure, glanced at him in mild surprise. "I presume, as you are returning to the States, sir," he suggested, "that we must try to cancel the contracts which we have already concluded for the restoration of this place?" Thain shook his head. "Let them go on," he said. "It makes very little difference. I have a seven years' lease. I may come back again. The letters which I gave you with a cross you had better take into your own study and type. I shall be here to sign them when you have finished."