So feeble grew RoBards’ grudge that when he received a telegram all the way from San Francisco that Harry Chalender had died, he felt lonely; and tears ran down into his tremulous mouth. As always, Chalender had been engaged on a work of public benefaction. He had thrown himself, heart and soul, into the irrigation projects that were rescuing the Golden State into a paradise of vines and fig-trees, almonds and oranges and palms. Overwork and overexertion in the mountains broke his old heart. It was quaintly appropriate that his ever-driven heart should crack. Like so many of the republic’s heroes, his public morals were as pure as his private were sullied, and his funeral brought forth eulogium all across the continent. The public said, “He was a patriot!” and none knew how many women keened, “Harry was a darling, a darling, a darling.” The departure of Chalender took a prop from RoBards. He had outlived the rival who had saved his life and embittered it, and had confessed that RoBards had done him greater injury. He, RoBards, was ready now to go, and merely waited. The only thing he wished to see was Immy. She wrote that she would come to live with him as soon as she could close up her husband’s mixed affairs and learn whether she were rich or poor. As an earnest of her coming she sent along a daughter, to go to an Eastern finishing school. She had been named Patty, and the girl had grown to such likeness that when she stood at last before RoBards he almost fell to his knees to welcome a revenant ghost to his arms. She stood mischievous, exquisite, ambrosially winsome, ready to laugh or cry, threaten or take flight, according to whichever stratagem she could best use to gain her whim. She ran into her grandfather’s bosom and set his old heart to clamoring like a firebell in the night. Her lips tasted like Patty’s lips. Her flesh beneath his caress had the same peachy mellowness. So there was a new Patty in the world! The world would never lack for Patty Jessamines. Nor for David RoBardses, either, it seemed; for every body said that Keith’s son, Ward, was just like his grandfather. But only in looks, for Ward was already an engineer in his father’s office and even more zealous to build inland seas upon other people’s lands for the sake of the infinite New York he loved. Ward fought his grandfather, called him an old fogy, a poor Canute who wanted to check the world’s greatest city; and in his very ardor resembled RoBards more than either realized. He resembled him, too, in his response to the fascination of this new Patty. They were cousins, and in RoBards’ youth that had implied a love-affair. But nowadays such alliances were looked upon as perilous and scandalous. So Ward gave Patty merely the glance of admiration a temperate man casts upon a jeweler’s window and resumed his efforts to convert his grandfather to the justice of making Westchester a mere cistern for New York.