“I’ve just been talking with Grandam,” he plunged at once into what was on his mind. “And I say, Ariel, I am more sorry than I can tell about ‘Noon.’ Why I didn’t have it out, at least, before you got here, I can’t see now. Grandam considers herself lucky to have acquired it for her mantel now. But she’ll lend it to the exhibition, of course. I’ll get in touch with Charlie Frye about that the first minute we hear from him. And afterwards ‘Noon’ is to be yours. It doesn’t belong to me after the way I’ve treated it, of course.” “After Grandam dies”—Ariel said the word without fear—“I’m going to buy ‘Noon’ from you, Hugh Weyman. You must let her keep it till then. I’ve already told her. She understands, and she’s going to help me so that I _can_ buy it. She knows about a job she thinks I can get. The minute I begin to earn, I shall begin to save—toward ‘Noon’ and toward my lovely white coat.” “Why, Ariel!” “Oh! Probably you think it will take me forever. But it won’t. It’s quite a good job, Grandam says. I’m not counting on the exhibition any more, do you see! I know that Mrs. Nevin has told you that nothing will come of it. And Grandam herself says that Father may have been the greatest of geniuses, but that that doesn’t necessarily mean the world’s going to admit it. It may take hundreds of years, she says—and it may take forever—which means never, of course. But Father was (you must believe me—Grandam does) absolutely certain that rich people with taste like Mrs. Nevin and Michael Schwankovsky had only to see the exhibition and they would be glad to pay quite big prices for the pictures. And I’d be then absolutely independent. He did not dream what an unreasonable thing he was doing—throwing me onto you and your family, when you were strangers, not even relations, and—” Hugh leaned toward her. He found her shoulders through the eiderdown and shook her, not entirely playfully. “We are not strangers. Your father was my friend. I loved him. I love him now. There will never be anything like that again for me. It is only other things—life itself—that made me blunder so with him, in not writing, or going back all these years, and in my neglect of you since you’ve been here at Wild Acres. There’s something that has blinded me, mixed me up. You wouldn’t understand. Grandam’s the only person in the world who could understand, and I don’t bother her with it. She thinks I’ve acted like a fool toward you and toward your father. But all the same, she knows that I loved your father, and that _I cherish you_.”