“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.
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.
