our living expenses diminish, my wife means to come forward--her idea
would be to give the building--"

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 b