It was a horrible day for him. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He sat on the sun scorched little porch conscientiously watching his languid child digging in the gutter. It seemed to him to spend all its waking hours there, busy with some patient work. At noon he brought her in and fed her with the lunch Minnie had left, then he rocked her to sleep in a hammock on the sweltering porch. He wandered about the hot, dirty little house, smoking and trying not to think. He did not dare to reflect, he did not wish to face the secret desolation in his soul. He valiantly maintained that his life here with Minnie was “wholesome,” was “normal,” was really the best sort of life. And tried to deny visions of cool seaside hotels, or bars where men lounged in flannels and drank those amazing and adorable American drinks, with ice clinking in them.... He almost saw himself on the veranda of a country club, with other well-dressed people, gay, careless, enviable. He strode across the tiny dining-room to disperse a swarm of flies about an uncovered sugar bowl, and jerked down the dark shades, as much to hide the room from his own eyes as to quiet the disgusting insects. She _would_ leave the cloth on the table all day long, with its crumbs and grease spots. The baby called him; he went out and took her out of the hammock, poor hot, patient little soul! He washed her pale little face, disfigured with mosquito bites, and carried her out on the porch again. He held her in his lap; she didn’t want to stir, lay against him, staring before her. Toward five o’clock Minnie came home, pallid and limp from the heat, with her black hair escaping in wisps from under her crushed little hat. “She looks like a char-woman,” he reflected, as he watched her coming. She flung herself into a chair. “Oh, _Lionel_!” she said, “_what_ do you think!” He asked “What?” without much interest, expecting to hear that cotton stockings were so much dearer, or some other Minnie news. She pulled a bulky paper out of her hand-bag. “Horace’s will!” she said, “and he hasn’t left you a penny. The lawyer told me this is a new one, made only a month ago. And that he’d been arranging a trust fund or something of the sort for you--something all tied up, so you could only touch the interest--and then, before he’d signed anything, he died. Oh, Lionel! Not a penny!” IV Then, too, he might have foreseen and prevented her next step, but again he failed to do so, because it was a bit beyond his imagination. She wrote a terrific letter to Julie, telling her she was defrauding Lionel of his rights, that she knew Horace’s intentions, and ought, if she had _any_ feeling of honour, to carry them out. Julie replied briefly: “You won’t get a red cent out of me, now or any other time. I’m sorry for Lionel, but he has got to lie in the bed he’s made.” Lionel didn’t even reproach Minnie for having written. What was the use? His humiliation couldn’t be hidden from any one.