"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!"