Raycie ever again allude to the Raycie Gallery. But when his will was opened it was found that he had bequeathed the pictures to his son. The rest of his property was left absolutely to his two daughters. The bulk of the estate was Mrs. Raycie’s; but it was known that Mrs. Raycie had had her instructions, and among them, perhaps, was the order to fade away in her turn after six months of widowhood. When she had been laid beside her husband in Trinity church-yard her will (made in the same week as Mr. Raycie’s, and obviously at his dictation) was found to allow five thousand dollars a year to Lewis during his life-time; the residue of the fortune, which Mr. Raycie’s thrift and good management had made into one of the largest in New York, was divided between the daughters. Of these, the one promptly married a Kent and the other a Huzzard; and the latter, Sarah Ann (who had never been Lewis’s favourite), was wont to say in later years: “Oh, no, I never grudged my poor brother those funny old pictures. You see, we have a Raphael.”

            The house stood on the corner of Third Avenue and Tenth Street. It had lately come to Lewis Raycie as his share in the property of a distant cousin, who had made an “old New York will” under which all his kin benefited in proportion to their consanguinity. The neighbourhood was unfashionable, and the house in bad repair; but Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Raycie, who, since their marriage, had been living in retirement at Tarrytown, immediately moved into it.

            Their arrival excited small attention. Within a year of his father’s death, Lewis had married Treeshy Kent. The alliance had not been encouraged by Mr. and Mrs. Kent, who went so far as to say that their niece might have done better; but as that one of their sons who was still unmarried had always shown a lively sympathy for Treeshy, they yielded to the prudent thought that, after all, it was better than having her entangle Bill.

            The Lewis Raycies had been four years married, and during that time had dropped out of the memory of New York as completely as if their exile had covered half a century. Neither of them had ever cut a great figure there. Treeshy had been nothing but the Kent’s Cinderella, and Lewis’s ephemeral importance, as heir to the Raycie millions, had been effaced by the painful episode which resulted in his being deprived of them.

            So secluded was their way of living, and so much had it come to be a habit, that when Lewis announced that he had inherited Uncle Ebenezer’s house his wife hardly looked up from the baby-blanket she was embroidering.

            “Uncle Ebenezer’s house in New York?”

            He drew a deep breath. “Now I shall be able to show the pictures.”

            “Oh, Lewis—” She dropped the blanket. “Are we going to live there?”

            “Certainly. But the house is so large that I shall turn the two corner rooms on the ground floor into a gallery. They are very suitably lighted. It was there that Cousin Ebenezer was laid out.”

            “Oh, Lewis—”

            If anything could have made Lewis Raycie believe in his own strength of will it was his wife’s attitude. Merely to hear that unquestioning murmur of submission was to feel something of his father’s tyrannous strength arise in him; but with the wish to use it more humanely.

            “You’ll like that, Treeshy? It’s been dull for you here, I know.”

            She flushed up. “Dull? With you, darling. Besides, I like the country. But I shall like Tenth Street too. Only—you said there were repairs?”

            He nodded sternly. “I shall borrow money to make them. If necessary—” he lowered his voice—“I shall mortgage the pictures.”

            He saw her eyes fill. “Oh, but it won’t be! There are so many ways still in which I can economize.”

            He laid his hand on hers and turned his profile toward her, because he knew it was so much stronger than his full face.