David Harum by Edward Noyes Westcott — Read

How John Lenox tried to kill time during the following two months, and how time retaliated during the process, it is needless to set forth. It may not, however, be wholly irrelevant to note that his cough had gradually disappeared, and that his appetite had become good enough to carry him through the average table d'hôte dinner. On the morning after his arrival at Naples he found a cable dispatch at the office of Cook & Son, as follows: "Sixty cash, forty stock. Stock good. Harum."

"God bless the dear old boy! " said John fervently. The Pennsylvania property was sold at last; and if "stock good" was true, the dispatch informed him that he was, if not a rich man for modern days, still, as David would have put it, "wuth consid'able. " No man, I take it, is very likely to receive such a piece of news without satisfaction; but if our friend's first sensation was one of gratification, the thought which followed had a drop of bitterness in it. "If I could only have had it before! " he said to himself; and indeed many of the disappointments of life, if not the greater part, come because events are unpunctual. They have a way of arriving sometimes too early, or worse, too late.