ts the sacred
opportunity of at last giving speech to his inarticulateness ..."

"Oh, damn it, they're too glib!" I muttered, dashing the letter down;
then, controlling my unreasoning resentment, I read on. "You remember,
old man, those words of his that you repeated to me three or four years
ago: 'I've half a mind to leave my money in trust to Ned'? Well, it
_has_ come to me in trust--as if in mysterious fulfillment of his
thought; and, oh, dear chap--" I dashed the letter down again, and
plunged into my work.

III

"WON'T you own yourself a beast, dear boy?" Halidon asked me gently,
one afternoon of the following spring.

I had escaped for a six weeks' holiday, and was lying outstretched
beside him in a willow chair on the terrace of their villa above
Florence.

My eyes turned from the happy vale at our feet to the illuminated face
beside me. A little way off, at the other end of the terrace, Mrs.
Halidon was bending over a pot of carnations on the balustrade.

"Oh, cheerfully," I assented.

"You see," he continued, glowing, "living here costs us next to
nothing, and it was quite _her_ idea, our founding that fourth
scholarship in memory of Paul."

I had already heard of the fourth scholarship, but I may have betrayed
my surprise at the plural pronoun, for the blood rose under Ned's
sensitive skin, and he said with an embarrassed laugh: "Ah, she so
completely makes me forget that it's not mine too."

"Well, the great thing is that you both think of it chiefly as his."

"Oh, chiefly--altogether. I should be no more than a wretched parasite
if I didn't live first of all for that!"

Mrs. Halidon had turned and was advancing toward us with the slow step
of leisurely enjoyment. The bud of her beauty had at last unfolded: her
vague enigmatical gaze had given way to the clear look of the woman
whose hand is on the clue of life.

"_She's_ not living for anything but her own happiness," I mused, "and
why in heaven's name should she? But Ned--"

"My wife," Halidon continued, his eyes following mine, "my wife feels
it too, even more strongly. You know a woman's sensitiveness.
She's--there's nothing she wouldn't do for his memory--because--in
other ways.... You understand," he added, lowering his tone as she drew
nearer, "that as soon as the child is born we mean to go home for good,
and take up his work--Paul's work."

Mrs. Halidon recovered slowly after the birth of her child: the return
to America was defe