But the next winter did not bring Ambrose back.  A brief line, written in November from the Italian lakes, told me that he had “a rotten cough,” and that the doctors were packing him off to Egypt.  Would I see the architects for him, and explain to the trustees?  (The Academy already had trustees, and all the rest of its official hierarchy.) And would they all excuse his not writing more than a word?  He was really too groggy—­but a little warm weather would set him up again, and he would certainly come home in the spring.

He came home in the spring—­in the hold of the ship, with his widow several decks above.  The funeral services were attended by all the officers of the Academy, and by two of the young fellows who had won the travelling scholarships, and who shed tears of genuine grief when their benefactor was committed to the grave.

After that there was a pause of suspense—­and then the newspapers announced that the late Paul Ambrose had left his entire estate to his widow.  The board of the Academy dissolved like a summer cloud, and the secretary lighted his pipe for a year with the official paper of the still-born institution.

After a decent lapse of time I called at the house in Seventeenth Street, and found a man attaching a real-estate agent’s sign to the window and a van-load of luggage backing away from the door.  The care-taker told me that Mrs. Ambrose was sailing the next morning.  Not long afterward I saw the library table with the helmeted knights standing before an auctioneer’s door in University Place; and I looked with a pang at the familiar ink-stains, in which I had so often traced the geography of Paul’s visionary world.

Halidon, who had picked up another job in the Orient, wrote me an elegiac letter on Paul’s death, ending with—­“And what about the Academy?” and for all answer I sent him a newspaper clipping recording the terms of the will, and another announcing the sale of the house and Mrs. Ambrose’s departure for Europe.

Though Ned and I corresponded with tolerable regularity I received no direct answer to this communication till about eighteen months later, when he surprised me by a letter dated from Florence.  It began:  “Though she tells me you have never understood her—­” and when I had reached that point I laid it down and stared out of my office window at the chimney-pots and the dirty snow on the roof.

“Ned Halidon and Paul’s wife!” I murmured; and, incongruously enough, my next thought was:  “I wish I’d bought the library table that day.”

The letter went on with waxing eloquence:  “I could not stand the money if it were not that, to her as well as to me, it represents the sacred opportunity of at last giving speech to his inarticulateness . . .”

“Oh, damn it, they’re too glib!” I muttered, dashing the letter down; then, controlling my unreasoning resentment, I read on.  “You remember, old man, those words of his that you repeated to me three or four years ago:  ’I’ve half a mind to leave my money in trust to Ned’?  Well, it has come to me in trust—­as if in mysterious fulfillment of his thought; and, oh, dear chap—­” I dashed the letter down again, and plunged into my work.