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“She must be a queer woman,” St. John bewailed himself, looking at the point of his cigar, and discovering to his surprise that it was out. He did not attempt to light it. “Of course, I can’t ask you who she is; but why shouldn’t I see her, and try what I can do with her? I’m the one that’s the principal sufferer in this matter,” he added, perhaps seeing refusal in Hewson’s troubled eye.

“Because–for one reason–she’s in London.”

“Oh Lord!” St. John lamented.

“But if she were here in New York, I couldn’t allow it,” he continued. “It was in confidence between us.”

“She doesn’t seem to have thought so,” said St. John, with sarcasm which Hewson could not resent.

“There’s only one thing for me to do,” said Hewson, who had been thinking the point over, and saw no other way out for him as a gentleman, or even merely as a just man. He was not rich, and in the face of the mounting accumulations of other men he had grown comparatively poor, without actually losing money, since he had begun to lead the life which had long been his ideal. After carefully ascertaining at the time in question that he had sufficient income from inherited means to live without his profession, he had closed his law-office without shutting many clients out, and had contributed himself to the formation of a leisure class, which he conceived was regrettably lacking in our conditions. He had taste, he had reading, he had a pretty knowledge of the world from travel, he had observed manners, and it seemed to him that he might not immodestly pretend to supply, as far as one man went, a well-recognized want.

Hitherto he had been able to live up to his ideal with, sufficient satisfaction, and in proposing to himself never to marry, but to grow old gradually and gracefully as a bachelor of adequate income, he saw no difficulties in his way for the future, until this affair of the apparition. If now he incurred the chances of an open change in his way of living–the end was simply a question of very little time. He must not only declass, he must depatriate himself, for he would not have the means of living even much more economically than he now lived in New York, if he did what a sense of honor, of just responsibility urged him to do with regard to St. John.

He would have been glad of any interposition of Providence that would have availed him against his obvious duty. He would have liked to recall the words saying that there was only one thing for him to do, but he could not recall them and he was forced to go on. “Will you sell me your place?” he said to St. John, colorlessly.

“Sell you my place? What do you mean?”

“Simply that if you will, I shall be glad to buy it at your own valuation.”

“Oh, look here, now, Hewson! I can’t let you do this,” St. John began, trying to feel a magnanimity which proved impossible to him. “What do you want with my place? You couldn’t get anybody to live there with you.”

“I couldn’t afford to live there in any case,” said Hewson; “but I am entirely willing to risk the purchase.”

Was it possible that Hewson knew something of the neighborhood or its future, which encouraged him to take the chances of the property appreciating in value? This thought passed through St. John’s mind, and he was not the man to let himself be overreached in a deal. “The place ought to be worth thirty thousand,” he said, for a bluff.

It was a relief for Hewson to feel ashamed of St. John instead of himself, for a moment. “Very well, I’ll give you thirty thousand.”

St. John examined himself for a responsive generosity. The most he could say was, “You’re doing this because of what I’d said.”