And meanwhile, Raymond, off by himself somewhere or other, I suppose, may have been studying how in the world he was ever going to put Albert through Yale. VI Business once more! It ought to be barred. I get enough of it in my daily routine without having it intrude here. Business should do no more than provide the platform and the scenic background for the display of young love, hope and beauty. But here we have to deal with the affairs of a worried and incompetent man half way through his fifties. Raymond came in one morning, on my summons. His manner was depressed; it was becoming habitually so. I tried to cheer him with indifferent topics,--among them the horse-show, which I saw so unsatisfactorily and which I have described so inadequately. He had already heard about it from Albert, and he felt no relish for the friendliness Johnny McComas had displayed on that occasion. "Trying to get _him_, too?" was Raymond's comment. "Oh, I wouldn't quite say _that_...." "I have a letter from his mother. She wants to know about college." "Well, how _are_ things?" "Oh, I don't know; poor." "That Iowa company?" "Next year." "Again?" "Yes--next year; as usual." "Well, I have news for you." "Good?" he asked, picking up a little. "That depends on how you look at it. I have a buyer for your house." "Thank God!" "Don't hurry to thank God. Perhaps you will want to thank the Devil." Raymond's face fell. "You don't mean that _he_--on top of everything else--has come forward to--?" "My friend! my friend! It isn't that at all. 'He' has nothing to do with it. Quite another party." And it was. A Mr. Gluckstein, a sort of impresario made suddenly rich by a few seasons with fiddlers and prima donnas, was the man. He was willing, he said,--and I paid the news out as evenly and considerately as I could,--he was willing to take the house and assume the mortgage--but he asked a bonus of five thousand dollars for doing it. "The scoundrel!" groaned Raymond, his face twisted by contemptuous rage. "The impudent scoundrel!" "Possibly so. But that is his offer--and the only one. And it is his best." Raymond sat with his eyes on the floor. He was afraid to let me see his face. He hated the house--it was an incubus, a millstone; but-- He visibly despaired. "What shall I do about Albert's college, now?" he muttered presently. He seemed to have passed at a bound beyond the stage of sale and transfer. The odious property was off his hands--and every hope of a spare dollar had gone with it. "His mother writes--" began Raymond. "Yes?" "She tells me--Well, her father died last month, it seems, and she is expecting something out of his estate...." "Estate? Is there one?" "Who can say? A man in that business! There might be something; there might be nothing or less. And it might take a year or more to get it." "And if there is anything?"