“Who? The Man who healed you?”
“Yes.”
Gilderman had been feeling in his vest pocket. “Here, Tom,” he said, “take this.”
Kettle shrank back. “I don’t want your money,” he said, resentfully, and then he turned away.
Gilderman, as he went back to the carriage, wondered passively why Tom Kettle did not take the money. He felt that he could not just understand the workings of the man’s soul.
X
A VOICE FROM THE DEAD
THE De Witts were cousins of the Gildermans. Nearly all the great metropolitan plutocratic families were either allied or connected with one another, and the De Witts and the Gildermans were doubly connected by marriage in the generation of Gilderman’s father.
The De Witts had been building a country-house some little distance out of the city and not far from the water. The architects and builders and landscape gardeners had been at work upon it for over a year. It was now about completed, and it was the intention of the family to open the house in May. It was not even yet quite furnished, but it was so nearly so that it was practically inhabitable. The stables had been filled, and a corps of servants had been sent down under Mrs. Lukens the housekeeper and Dolan the head-groom. Halliday, the gardener, already had the green-houses and the palm-house looking as though they had been in operation for twenty years. The grounds, under the direction of Mr. Blumenthal, had been laid out in a rather elaborate imitation of a foreign park. He had planted clumps of oak-trees nearly full-grown, which he had transplanted at an enormous cost of money and labor. The arrangement of the clumps of rhododendrons and other flowering shrubs was, indeed, a work of art. The great park, together with the paddock and the kitchen-garden, occupied nearly a mile square of ground that had become very valuable as suburban property. The estate included several acres of ground in the northwestern suburb of the neighboring town.