“Even Henley!” Clare sighed.  “Then I’m the only one left out?”

Ralph felt the colour in his face.  “Well, you see, I shall need as much as fifty—­”

Her hands flew together joyfully.  “But then you’ve got to let me help!  Oh, I’m so glad—­so glad!  I’ve twenty thousand waiting.”

He looked about the room, checked anew by all its oppressive implications.  “You’re a darling...but I couldn’t take it.”

“I’ve told you it’s mine, every penny of it!”

“Yes; but supposing things went wrong?”

“Nothing can—­if you’ll only take it...”

“I may lose it—­”

“I sha’n’t, if I’ve given it to you!” Her look followed his about the room and then came back to him.  “Can’t you imagine all it will make up for?”

The rapture of the cry caught him up with it.  Ah, yes, he could imagine it all!  He stooped his head above her hands.  “I accept,” he said; and they stood and looked at each other like radiant children.

She followed him to the door, and as he turned to leave he broke into a laugh.  “It’s queer, though, its happening in this room!”

She was close beside him, her hand on the heavy tapestry curtaining the door; and her glance shot past him to her husband’s portrait.  Ralph caught the look, and a flood of old tendernesses and hates welled up in him.  He drew her under the portrait and kissed her vehemently.

XXXV

Within forty-eight hours Ralph’s money was in Moffatt’s hands, and the interval of suspense had begun.

The transaction over, he felt the deceptive buoyancy that follows on periods of painful indecision.  It seemed to him that now at last life had freed him from all trammelling delusions, leaving him only the best thing in its gift—­his boy.

The things he meant Paul to do and to be filled his fancy with happy pictures.  The child was growing more and more interesting—­throwing out countless tendrils of feeling and perception that delighted Ralph but preoccupied the watchful Laura.

“He’s going to be exactly like you, Ralph—­” she paused and then risked it:  “For his own sake, I wish there were just a drop or two of Spragg in him.”

Ralph laughed, understanding her.  “Oh, the plodding citizen I’ve become will keep him from taking after the lyric idiot who begot him.  Paul and I, between us, are going to turn out something first-rate.”

His book too was spreading and throwing out tendrils, and he worked at it in the white heat of energy which his factitious exhilaration produced.  For a few weeks everything he did and said seemed as easy and unconditioned as the actions in a dream.