Dick shook his head. “Not lately. He hasn’t had much to do this winter, and these last months he had chucked everything to work alone over his plans.” The word brought a faint colour to Mrs. Peyton’s cheek. It was the first allusion that either of them had made to Darrow’s bequest. “Oh, of course you must do all you can,” she murmured, turning alone into the house. The emotions of the morning had stirred her deeply, and she sat at home during the day, letting her mind dwell, in a kind of retrospective piety, on the thought of poor Darrow’s devotion. She had given him too little time while he lived, had acquiesced too easily in his growing habits of seclusion; and she felt it as a proof of insensibility that she had not been more closely drawn to the one person who had loved Dick as she loved him. The evidence of that love, as shown in Darrow’s letter, filled her with a vain compunction. The very extravagance of his offer lent it a deeper pathos. It was wonderful that, even in the urgency of affection, a man of his almost morbid rectitude should have overlooked the restrictions of professional honour, should have implied the possibility of his friend’s overlooking them. It seemed to make his sacrifice the more complete that it had, unconsciously, taken the form of a subtle temptation. The last word arrested Mrs. Peyton’s thoughts. A temptation? To whom? Not, surely, to one capable, as her son was capable, of rising to the height of his friend’s devotion. The offer, to Dick, would mean simply, as it meant to her, the last touching expression of an inarticulate fidelity: the utterance of a love which at last had found its formula. Mrs. Peyton dismissed as morbid any other view of the case. She was annoyed with herself for supposing that Dick could be ever so remotely affected by the possibility at which poor Darrow’s renunciation hinted. The nature of the offer removed it from practical issues to the idealizing region of sentiment. Mrs. Peyton had been sitting alone with these thoughts for the greater part of the afternoon, and dusk was falling when Dick entered the drawing-room. In the dim light, with his pallour heightened by the sombre effect of his mourning, he came upon her almost startlingly, with a revival of some long-effaced impression which, for a moment, gave her the sense of struggling among shadows. She did not, at first, know what had produced the effect; then she saw that it was his likeness to his father. “Well--is it over?” she asked, as he threw himself into a chair without speaking. “Yes: I’ve looked through everything.” He leaned back, crossing his hands behind his head, and gazing past her with a look of utter lassitude. She paused a moment, and then said tentatively: “to-morrow you will be able to go back to your work.” “Oh--my work,” he exclaimed, as if to brush aside an ill-timed pleasantry. “Are you too tired?”