Hugh had never come back to Bermuda and his letters were infrequent. Gregory Clare’s own letters were, from the beginning, almost non-existent, because that was his casual way with friends. One of Hugh’s first letters told them of the sudden death of his father, and that Hugh’s plan for making himself a lawyer was frustrated by the necessity of getting as quickly as was possible into his father’s niche in the business world. But Hugh did not use the term “frustration,” and there was, indeed, no touch of bitterness in the communication. The hint of a real grief was there, and a suggestion, somehow, that his father could not have been so exceptional in business capacity as in personality and character, since at the time of his death he had pretty well gone through his inheritance and was leaving his family little but a name. The name, however, was not clouded by his purely financial inability and was now of invaluable assistance to Hugh, who was being quite spoiled—according to his own account—by Wall Street associates of his father who had taken him into a big bond house on a floor several stories removed from the bottom. After that the studio heard from Hugh Weyman, bond salesman, at longer and longer intervals. Clare was afraid that his friend was absorbed by business, a dire calamity to befall a young man who had once been rejoiced to spend one fourth of his year’s income on the pigment splashed on a four foot by three foot bit of canvas. And now, for a year past, no word of any sort had come from Hugh, until the morning of the artist’s death. And although her father seemed actually to have held his death at bay those last few days, merely in the hope of that last letter, he did not show it to Ariel. But he explained to her, faintly and with an odd, smiling satisfaction, after he had read it to himself, and she had carefully burned it under his direction in the studio fireplace, that it was an answer to a letter from himself written within the week. His letter had told Hugh that he was near death, and asked him to invite Ariel to visit the Weymans for the latter part of the winter, while Charlie Frye, a young disciple of Clare’s, who had spent the last few months in Bermuda working with him, was arranging for an exhibition and sale of Clare’s paintings in New York. Ariel was being left only a very few hundred dollars, but the sale of the pictures ought to carry her through any number of farther years, until, in any case, she should either have married or have prepared herself for some profession. Their doctor, here in Bermuda, would be Ariel’s actual guardian in law. Charlie Frye would be her business manager in a practical sense. Would Hugh make himself her host and friend for the coming difficult period? Neither the kindly doctor, nor the young and enthusiastic Frye seemed to Clare quite the man to do precisely this for his girl.