“Why, you’ll be rich in six months. The boy won’t need me.”
“You shall go halves in the boy, Jimmy,” the other spoke brokenly. And then, in a flash: “There’s a man in the class I must find now, and I don’t know who he is.”
“What do you mean?” Pendleton asked.
And Ellsworth told the story of his coming to New Haven. As he finished, staring with a new passion of affection at the bald head and unclassic profile turned from him to the flying landscape, he felt his pulse leap and stand still. In that second he knew.
“Jim,” he said, “it was you.”
Pendleton turned his head and looked at him. “I suppose you’ll want to pay me,” he said sadly.
Ellsworth, quite careless of the hundred or so people about them, put his arm around the other’s shoulder. “Never, Jimmy,” he said. “You’ll never see a cent of that money till your dying day. So give it up. And I’ll never thank you. I—I can’t.”
“Go to thunder,” remarked Pendleton savagely. And then, after a pause: “Wouldn’t you have done it?”
“Margaret said that,” Ellsworth threw at him. “Margaret said it would be selfish not to take it. She said that the man who did that thing in that way was heavenly. That’s her word, heavenly.”
There was no answer, but the slow red which spread to Jimmy Pendleton’s bald head showed that he heard.