“Heaven knows what will become of the scheme, if Paul doesn’t live to carry it out.  There are a lot of hungry Ambrose cousins who will make one gulp of his money, and never give a dollar to the work.  Jove, it would be a fine thing to have the carrying out of such a plan—­but he’ll do it yet, you’ll see he’ll do it yet!” cried Ned, his old faith in his friend flaming up again through the wet blanket of fact.

II

PAUL AMBROSE did not die and leave his fortune to Halidon, but the following summer he did something far more unexpected.  He went abroad again, and came back married.  Now our busy fancy had never seen Paul married.  Even Ned recognized the vague unlikelihood of such a metamorphosis.

“He’d stick at the parson’s fee—­not to mention the best man’s scarf-pin.  And I should hate,” Ned added sentimentally, “to see ’the touch of a woman’s hand’ desecrate the sublime ugliness of the ancestral home.  Think of such a house made ’cozy’!”

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.