council for _that_...!" He waved his arm
again toward the well-parked river front. "Ever since I sold your farm
for you and you began putting your money into the business, we've walked
right along with it. Even before you left Siegel Brothers and we used to
sit up nights with the map, planning where to put our money like a
checker-board, we saw things like this for the town, and now we've made
'em true. And you say we've done nothing!" The senior partner was
touched a little in his tenderest susceptibilities.

"Oh, well," Peter admitted with a shamed laugh, "I suppose man is an
incurable egotist. I was thinking of something more personal, something
_mine_, the way a book or a picture belongs to the man who makes it."

"The game isn't over yet," Lessing reminded him, with a glance at the
unfolding bud which Clarice had sent as a symbol of the opening year;
"you're only forty. And, anyway, the money's yours; you made it."
Something in the word recalled him to a thought that had been earlier
in his mind. "Clarice wanted me to ask you to-day if you had any idea
how much you are worth."

Peter's attention came back from the window with a start. "Does that
mean the Fresh Air Fund or the Association for the Protection of
Ownerless Pups?"

Julian grinned. "Ownerless bachelors rather. Clarice has an idea you are
well enough off to marry."

"If it were a proposition of my being married to Clarice I should
consider myself well enough off without anything else----" Peter dropped
the light, accustomed banter for a sober tone. "How well off does your
wife think I ought to be?"

"She's got it figured out that all you've spent on making Ellen
comfortable for life isn't a patch on what she and the boys cost me, so
it's high time you set about your natural destiny of making some woman
happy."

"Look here, Julian, _is_ it an object for a man to live for, making some
woman happy?"

"Well, it keeps you on the jump all right," Lessing assured him. "What
else is there? It's a way of making yourself happy when you come to
look at it; keeping her and the kids so that you leave the world better
off than you found it. It suits _me_." He was looking, indeed,
particularly well suited, in spite of a disposition to portliness and a
suspicion of thinning hair, with what the seventeen years just past had
brought him. A warm appreciation of what those things were touched his
regard for his companion with a sober affectionateness. "I reckon
Cl