"She says she will look after Albert's first year or two. I was about to refuse, but I expect I shall have to listen now." He was silent. Then he broke out:-- "But there won't be. That old woman with her water-waves and her wrinkles is still hanging on; even if there should be anything, she would be the one to get most of it. I know her--she would snatch it all!" "Listen, Raymond," I said; "you had better let _me_ help you here." "I don't want you to. There must be some way to manage." He fell into thought. "I doubt if she can do anything, herself. Whatever she did would come through him in the end. You say he likes Albert?" He was silent again. "I don't want to meet either of them--but I would about as soon meet him as her." I saw that he was nerving himself for another _scene a faire_. Well, it would be less trying than the first one. If his sense of form, his _flair_ for fatalism, still persisted, ease was out of the question and no surrogate could serve. Perhaps, after all, there had been nothing between those two. Anyway, in the general eye the marriage had made everything right. She was accepted, certainly. And as certainly he had lived down, if he had ever possessed it, the reputation of a hapless husband. He wrote to her in a non-committal way--a letter which left loopholes, room for accommodation. Her reply suggested that he call at the bank; she would pass on the word. He told me he would try to do so. I saw the impudent concert-monger was to have his house. And so, one forenoon, at eleven or so, Raymond, after some self-drivings, reached the bank; by appointment, as he understood. Through the big doors; up the wide, balustraded stairway--it was the first time he had ever been in the place. He was well on the way to the broad, square landing, when some lively clerks or messengers, who had been springing along behind him, all at once slackened their pace and began to skirt the paneled marble walls. A number of prosperous middle-aged and elderly men were coming down together in a compact group. It seemed as if some directors' meeting was in progress--in progress from one office, or one building, to another. In the middle of the group was John W. McComas. He was absorbed, abstracted. Raymond, like some of the other up-farers, had gained the landing, and like them now stood a little to one side. McComas looked out at him with no particular expression and indeed with no markedness of attention. "How do you do?" he said indifferently. "I'm pretty well," said Raymond dispiritedly. "And that was all!" he reported next day in a high state of indignation. "Don't suppose I shall try it again!" But a careless Gertrude had failed to inform her husband of the appointment. She had been busy, or he had been away from home.... "Go once more," I counseled, I pleaded. A note came to him from McComas--a decent, a civil. Come and talk things over--that was its purport. He went.