pleased--pleased at the wider vista of activity that Lord Blandamer's
offer opened, and pleased that he should be chosen as the channel
through which an announcement of such gravity was to be made. He felt,
in short, that pleasurable and confused excitement, that mental
inebriation, which unexpected good fortune is apt to produce in any
except the strongest minds, and went down to Mr Sharnall's room still
crumpling the letter in his hand. The bloater was left to waste its
sweetness on the morning air.

"I have just received some extraordinary news," he said, as he opened
the door.

Mr Sharnall was not altogether unprepared, for Miss Joliffe had already
informed him that a letter from Lord Blandamer had arrived for Mr
Westray; so he only said "Ah!" in a tone that implied compassion for the
lack of mental balance which allowed Westray to be so easily astonished,
and added "Ah, yes?" as a manifesto that no sublunary catastrophe could
possibly astonish him, Mr Sharnall. But Westray's excitement was
cold-waterproof, and he read the letter aloud with much jubilation.

"Well," said the organist, "I don't see much in it; seven thousand
pounds is nothing to him. When we have done all that we ought to do, we
are unprofitable servants."

"It isn't only seven thousand pounds; don't you see he gives
carte-blanche for repairs in general? Why, it may be thirty or forty
thousand, or even more."

"Don't you wish you may get it?" the organist said, raising his eyebrows
and shutting his eyelids.

Westray was nettled.

"Oh, I think it's mean to sneer at everything the man does. We abused
him yesterday as a niggard; let us have the grace to-day to say we were
mistaken." He was afflicted with the over-scrupulosity of a refined,
but strictly limited mind, and his conscience smote him. "I, at any
rate, was quite mistaken," he went on; "I quite misinterpreted his
hesitation when I mentioned the cost of the transept repairs."

"Your chivalrous sentiments do you the greatest credit," the organist
said, "and I congratulate you on being able to change your ideas so
quickly. As for me, I prefer to stick to my first opinion. It is all
humbug; either he doesn't mean to pay, or else he has some plan of his
own to push. _I_ wouldn't touch his money with a barge-pole."

"Oh no, of course not," Westray said, with the exaggerated sarcasm of a
schoolboy in his tone. "If he was to offer a thousand pounds to restore
the organ, you would