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But when the news came he would own neither to surprise nor to disappointment.

“Goodbye, poor Academy!” I exclaimed, tossing over the bridegroom’s eight-page rhapsody to Halidon, who had received its duplicate by the same post.

“Now, why the deuce do you say that?” he growled. “I never saw such a beast as you are for imputing mean motives.”

To defend myself from this accusation I put out my hand and recovered Paul’s letter.

“Here: listen to this. ‘Studying art in Paris when I met her–“the vision and the faculty divine, but lacking the accomplishment,” etc. . . . A little ethereal profile, like one of Piero della Francesca’s angels . . . not rich, thank heaven, but not afraid of money, and already enamored of my project for fertilizing my sterile millions . . .'”

“Well, why the deuce–?” Ned began again, as though I had convicted myself out of my friend’s mouth; and I could only grumble obscurely: “It’s all too pat.”

He brushed aside my misgivings. “Thank heaven, she can’t paint, any how. And now that I think of it, Paul’s just the kind of chap who ought to have a dozen children.”

“Ah, then indeed: goodbye, poor Academy!” I croaked.

The lady was lovely, of that there could be no doubt; and if Paul now for a time forgot the Academy, his doing so was but a vindication of his sex. Halidon had only a glimpse of the returning couple before he was himself snatched up in one of the chariots of adventure that seemed perpetually waiting at his door. This time he was going to the far East in the train of a “special mission,” and his head was humming with new hopes and ardors; but he had time for a last word with me about Ambrose.

“You’ll see–you’ll see!” he summed up hopefully as we parted; and what I was to see was, of course, the crowning pinnacle of the Academy lifting itself against the horizon of the immediate future.

It was in the nature of things that I should, meanwhile, see less than formerly of the projector of that unrealized structure. Paul had a personal dread of society, but he wished to show his wife to the world, and I was not often a spectator on these occasions. Paul indeed, good fellow, tried to maintain the pretense of an unbroken intercourse, and to this end I was asked to dine now and then; but when I went I found guests of a new type, who, after dinner, talked of sport and stocks, while their host blinked at them silently through the smoke of his cheap cigars.

The first innovation that struck me was a sudden improvement in the quality of the cigars. Was this Daisy’s doing? (Mrs. Ambrose was Daisy.) It was hard to tell–she produced her results so noiselessly. With her fair bent head and vague smile, she seemed to watch life flow by without, as yet, trusting anything of her own to its current. But she was watching, at any rate, and anything might come of that. Such modifications as she produced were as yet almost imperceptible to any but the trained observer. I saw that Paul wished her to be well dressed, but also that he suffered her to drive in a hired brougham, and to have her door opened by the raw-boned Celt who had bumped down the dishes on his bachelor table. The drawing-room curtains were renewed, but this change served only to accentuate the enormities of the carpet, and perhaps discouraged Mrs. Ambrose from farther experiments. At any rate, the desecrating touch that Halidon had affected to dread made no other inroads on the serried ugliness of the Ambrose interior.

In the early summer, when Ned returned, the Ambroses had flown to Europe again–and the Academy was still on paper.

“Well, what do you make of her?” the traveller asked, as we sat over our first dinner together.

“Too many things–and they don’t hang together. Perhaps she’s still in the chrysalis stage.”