“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.

When they returned in the spring, I heard that they had bought the Brereton house, for what seemed to my inexperienced ears a very large sum.  But Ned, whom I met one day at the club, explained to me convincingly that it was really the most economical thing they could do.  “You don’t understand about such things, dear boy, living in your Diogenes tub; but wait till there’s a Mrs. Diogenes.  I can assure you it’s a lot cheaper than building, which is what Daisy would have preferred, and of course,” he added, his color rising as our eyes met, “of course, once the Academy’s going, I shall have to make my head-quarters here; and I suppose even you won’t grudge me a roof over my head.”

The Brereton roof was a vast one, with a marble balustrade about it; and I could quite understand, without Ned’s halting explanation, that “under the circumstances” it would be necessary to defer what he called “our work—­” “Of course, after we’ve rallied from this amputation, we shall grow fresh supplies—­I mean my wife’s investments will,” he laughingly corrected, “and then we’ll have no big outlays ahead and shall know exactly where we stand.  After all, my dear fellow, charity begins at home!”