o Egypt. Would I see
the architects for him, and explain to the trustees? (The Academy
already had trustees, and all the rest of its official hierarchy.) And
would they all excuse his not writing more than a word? He was really
too groggy--but a little warm weather would set him up again, and he
would certainly come home in the spring.

He came home in the spring--in the hold of the ship, with his widow
several decks above. The funeral services were attended by all the
officers of the Academy, and by two of the young fellows who had won
the travelling scholarships, and who shed tears of genuine grief when
their benefactor was committed to the grave.

After that there was a pause of suspense--and then the newspapers
announced that the late Paul Ambrose had left his entire estate to his
widow. The board of the Academy dissolved like a summer cloud, and the
secretary lighted his pipe for a year with the official paper of the
still-born institution.

After a decent lapse of time I called at the house in Seventeenth
Street, and found a man attaching a real-estate agent's sign to the
window and a van-load of luggage backing away from the door. The
care-taker told me that Mrs. Ambrose was sailing the next morning. Not
long afterward I saw the library table with the helmeted knights
standing before an auctioneer's door in University Place; and I looked
with a pang at the familiar ink-stains, in which I had so often traced
the geography of Paul's visionary world.

Halidon, who had picked up another job in the Orient, wrote me an
elegiac letter on Paul's death, ending with--"And what about the
Academy?" and for all answer I sent him a newspaper clipping recording
the terms of the will, and another announcing the sale of the house and
Mrs. Ambrose's departure for Europe.

Though Ned and I corresponded with tolerable regularity I received no
direct answer to this communication till about eighteen months later,
when he surprised me by a letter dated from Florence. It began: "Though
she tells me you have never understood her--" and when I had reached
that point I laid it down and stared out of my office window at the
chimney-pots and the dirty snow on the roof.

"Ned Halidon and Paul's wife!" I murmured; and, incongruously enough,
my next thought was: "I wish I'd bought the library table that day."

The letter went on with waxing eloquence: "I could not stand the money
if it were not that, to her as well as to me, it represen