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“Fact is, I don’t get enough exercise–I must look about for a horse.”

He had gone afoot for a good many years, and kept his clear skin and quick eye on that homely regimen–but I had to remind myself that, after all, we were both older; and also that the Halidons had champagne every evening.

“How do you like these cigars? They’re some I’ve just got out from London, but I’m not quite satisfied with them myself,” he grumbled, pushing toward me the silver box and its attendant taper.

I leaned to the flame, and our eyes met as I lit my cigar. Ned flushed and laughed uneasily. “Poor Paul! Were you thinking of those execrable weeds of his?–I wonder how I knew you were? Probably because I have been wanting to talk to you of our plan–I sent Daisy off alone so that we might have a quiet evening. Not that she isn’t interested, only the technical details bore her.”

I hesitated. “Are there many technical details left to settle?”

Halidon pushed his armchair back from the fire-light, and twirled his cigar between his fingers. “I didn’t suppose there were till I began to look into things a little more closely. You know I never had much of a head for business, and it was chiefly with you that Paul used to go over the figures.”

“The figures–?”

“There it is, you see.” He paused. “Have you any idea how much this thing is going to cost?”

“Approximately, yes.”

“And have you any idea how much we–how much Daisy’s fortune amounts to?”

“None whatever,” I hastened to assert.

He looked relieved. “Well, we simply can’t do it–and live.”

“Live?”

“Paul didn’t live,” he said impatiently. “I can’t ask a woman with two children to think of–hang it, she’s under no actual obligation–” He rose and began to walk the floor. Presently he paused and halted in front of me, defensively, as Paul had once done years before. “It’s not that I’ve lost the sense of my obligation–it grows keener with the growth of my happiness; but my position’s a delicate one–“

“Ah, my dear fellow–“

“You do see it? I knew you would.” (Yes, he was duller!) “That’s the point. I can’t strip my wife and children to carry out a plan–a plan so nebulous that even its inventor. . . . The long and short of it is that the whole scheme must be re-studied, reorganized. Paul lived in a world of dreams.”

I rose and tossed my cigar into the fire. “There were some things he never dreamed of,” I said.

Halidon rose too, facing me uneasily. “You mean–?”

“That you would taunt him with not having spent that money.”

He pulled himself up with darkening brows; then the muscles of his forehead relaxed, a flush suffused it, and he held out his hand in boyish penitence.

“I stand a good deal from you,” he said.

He kept up his idea of going over the Academy question–threshing it out once for all, as he expressed it; but my suggestion that we should provisionally resuscitate the extinct board did not meet with his approval.

“Not till the whole business is settled. I shouldn’t have the face–Wait till I can go to them and say: ‘We’re laying the foundation-stone on such a day.'”

We had one or two conferences, and Ned speedily lost himself in a maze of figures. His nimble fancy was recalcitrant to mental discipline, and he excused his inattention with the plea that he had no head for business.

“All I know is that it’s a colossal undertaking, and that short of living on bread and water–” and then we turned anew to the hard problem of retrenchment.

At the close of the second conference we fixed a date for a third, when Ned’s business adviser was to be called in; but before the day came, I learned casually that the Halidons had gone south. Some weeks later Ned wrote me from Florida, apologizing for his remissness. They had rushed off suddenly–his wife had a cough, he explained.