He broke off and drummed on the table, waiting nervously for me to speak.  He did not say on what grounds he still counted on a diminution of his household expenses, and I had not the cruelty to press this point; but I murmured, after a moment:  “I think you’re right—­I should try to buy the land.”

We discussed his potentialities for work, which were obviously still an unknown quantity, and the conference ended in my sending him to a firm of real-estate brokers who were looking out for a partner with a little money to invest.  Halidon had a few thousands of his own, which he decided to embark in the venture; and thereafter, for the remaining months of the winter, he appeared punctually at a desk in the brokers’ office, and sketched plans of the Academy on the back of their business paper.  The site for the future building had meanwhile been bought, and I rather deplored the publicity which Ned gave to the fact; but, after all, since this publicity served to commit him more deeply, to pledge him conspicuously to the completion of his task, it was perhaps a wise instinct of self-coercion that had prompted him.

It was a dull winter in realty, and toward spring, when the market began to revive, one of the Halidon children showed symptoms of a delicate throat, and the fashionable doctor who humoured the family ailments counselled—­nay, commanded—­a prompt flight to the Mediterranean.

“He says a New York spring would be simply criminal—­and as for those ghastly southern places, my wife won’t hear of them; so we’re off.  But I shall be back in July, and I mean to stick to the office all summer.”

He was true to his word, and reappeared just as all his friends were deserting town.  For two torrid months he sat at his desk, drawing fresh plans of the Academy, and waiting for the wind-fall of a “big deal”; but in September he broke down from the effect of the unwonted confinement, and his indignant wife swept him off to the mountains.

“Why Ned should work when we have the money—­I wish he would sell that wretched piece of land!” And sell it he did one day:  I chanced on a record of the transaction in the realty column of the morning paper.  He afterward explained the sale to me at length.  Owing to some spasmodic effort at municipal improvement, there had been an unforeseen rise in the adjoining property, and it would have been foolish—­yes, I agreed that it would have been foolish.  He had made $10,000 on the sale, and that would go toward paying off what he had borrowed for the original purchase.  Meanwhile he could be looking about for another site.

Later in the winter he told me it was a bad time to look.  His position in the real-estate business enabled him to follow the trend of the market, and that trend was obstinately upward.  But of course there would be a reaction—­and he was keeping his eyes open.