The wretched affair dragged its full offensive length through the international press; leaving him with his divorce signed and a future endurable only when his senses had been sufficiently drugged.  In sober intervals he now had neuritis and a limp to distract his mind; also his former brother-in-law with professions of esteem and respect and a tendency to borrow.  And drunk or sober he had the Ariani.  But the house that Youth had built in the tinted obscurity of an old New York parlour—­no, he didn’t have that; and even memory of it were wellnigh gone had not Constance Palliser spoken from the shadows of the past.

He lifted his glass unsteadily and replaced it.  Then slowly he raised his head and looked full at Constance Palliser.

“It’s too late,” he said; “but I wish I had known that you remembered.”

“Would you have built it, Jim?”

He looked at her again, then shook his head:  “For whom am I to build, Constance?”

She leaned forward, glancing at the unconscious Hamil, then dropped her voice:  “Build it for the Boy that Was, Jim.”

“A headstone would be fitter—­and less expensive.”

“I am not asking you to build in memory of the dead.  The Boy who Was is only asleep.  If you could let him wake, suddenly, in that house—­”

A clear flush of surprise stained his skin to the hair.  It had been many years since a woman had hinted at any belief in him.

“Don’t you know that I couldn’t endure the four walls of a house, Constance?”

“You have not tried this house.”

“Men—­such men as I—­cannot go back to the House of Youth.”

“Try, Jim.”

His hand was shaking as he lifted it to adjust his spectacles; and impulsively she laid her hand on his twitching arm: 

“Jim, build it!—­and see what happens.”

“I cannot.”

“Build it.  You will not be alone and sad in it if you remember the boy and the child in the parlour.  They—­they will be good company—­if you wish.”

He rested his elbows on the table, head bent between his sea-burned hands.

“If I could only, only do something,” she whispered.  “The boy has merely been asleep, Jim.  I have always known it.  But it has taken many years for me to bring myself to this moment.”

“Do you think a man can come back through such wreckage and mire—­do you think he wants to come back?  What do you know about it?—­with your white skin and bright hair—­and that child’s mouth of yours—­What do you know about it?”

“Once you were the oracle, Jim.  May I not have my turn?”

“Yes—­but what in God’s name do you care?”

“Will you build?”

He looked at her dumbly, hopelessly; then his arm twitched and he relieved the wrist from the weight of his head, sitting upright, his eyes still bent on her.

“Because—­in that old parlour—­the child expected it of the boy,” she said.  “And expects it yet.”