“I may at that.  Garry, are you also involved?”

Hamil said, “Yes—­yes, of course,” and smiled meaninglessly at Wayward.

For a fraction of a second his aunt hesitated, then said:  “Garry is naturally among the devoted—­when he’s not dog-tired from a day in the cypress-swamps.  Have you been out to see the work, James?  Oh, you should go; everybody goes; it’s one of the things to do here.  And I’m very proud when I hear people say, ’There’s that brilliant young fellow, Hamil,’ or, in a tone which expresses profound respect, ’Hamil designed it, you know’; and I smile and think, ‘That’s my boy Garry!’ James, it is a very comfortable sensation for an old lady to experience.”  And she looked at Wayward out of her lovely golden eyes, sweet as a maid of twenty.

Wayward smiled, then absently bent his gaze on his wine-glass, lying back in his chair.  Through his spectacles his eyes seemed very intent on the frail crystal stem of his glass.

“What are you going to do for the rest of the winter?” she asked, watching him.

“What I am doing,” he replied with smiling bitterness.  “The Ariani is yonder when I can’t stand the shore....  What else is there for me to do—­until I snuff out!”

“Build that house you were going to build—­when we were rather younger, Jim.”

“I did; and it fell,” he said quietly; but, as though she had not heard. “—­Build that house,” she repeated, “and line it with books—­the kind of books that were written and read before the machine-made sort supplanted them.  One picture to a room—­do you remember, Jim?—­or two if you find it better; the kind men painted before Rembrandt died....  Do you remember your plan?—­the plans you drew for me to look at in our front parlour—­when New York houses had parlours?  You were twenty and I fourteen....  Garry, yonder, was not....  And the rugs, you recollect?—­one or two in a room, Shiraz, Ispahan—­nothing as obvious as Sehna and Saraband—­nothing but Moresque and pure Persian—­and one agedly perfect gem of Asia Minor, and one Tekke, so old and flawless that only the pigeon-blood fire remained under the violet bloom....  Do you remember?”

Wayward’s shoulders straightened with a jerk.  For twenty years he had not remembered these things; and she had not only remembered but was now reciting the strange, quaint, resurrected words in their forgotten sequence; the words he had uttered as he—­or what he had once been—­sat in the old-time parlour in the mellow half light of faded brocades and rosewood, repeating to a child the programme of his future.  Lofty aim and high ideal, the cultivated endeavour of good citizenship, loyalty to aspiration, courage, self-respect, and the noble living of life; they had also spoken of these things together—­there in the golden gloom of the old-time parlour when she was fourteen and he master of his fate and twenty.

But there came into his life a brilliant woman who stayed a year and left his name a mockery:  Malcourt’s only sister, now Lady Tressilvain, doubtfully conspicuous with her loutish British husband, among those continentals where titles serve rather to obscure than enlighten inquiry.