FORBES took the steamer he had planned to take, though he had such battles with his recalcitrant heart that he did not feel safe till the tender at Cherbourg put away from the ship and left him no opportunity of return.
Equally disconsolate was young Stowe Webb, who had lost his post with his chief, and who was in a panic of uncertainty. But Mildred, on her first day of calm, reverted to habit and began to take thought of the welfare of others. She asked Stowe of his plans, and, learning of his hopelessness, immediately begged him to act as her own secretary—"at an increase of salary because of the extra trouble she would give him."
The reaction from despair to this paradise was so great that young Webb found it hard to maintain the appropriate solemnity. He fired off a wireless to the friend who received his messages for Alice, and when he heard it crackling from the mast it was like a volley of festival sky-rockets.
He told Forbes of his new-found hope and how poor it was at best, and Forbes envied him his very deferment; there was something so clean and beautiful about a young lover trying to earn enough to earn the girl that waits for him. Young Webb was building a home, and Forbes was destroying one.
The arrival in New York brought a new mountain of tasks for Forbes. Mildred had adopted him as an elder brother; she gave him power of attorney in the endless interviews with the lawyers, executors, directors, and the officials in the Department of State.
Forbes soon learned what the Ambassador's hints as to his will had meant. A recent codicil bequeathed to him almost as much as Tait's dead son was to have had.
It seemed to Forbes as if Satan had laid the wealth of Ormus and of Ind at his feet and knelt there grinning over the hoard. There was a further sardonic bitterness in the legacy, since he knew that it had been given him so that he might feel able to make Mildred his wife without sacrifice of his pride.
The thought came to him that he could square himself with the dead and with the living by carrying out this implied, if not inscribed, condition of the deed of gift.
Mildred was a splendid soul. She was not Aphrodite like Persis, but Minerva was beautiful, too. Mildred was far nobler than Persis, who was not noble at all. She would be a magnificent wife. She would make their home a bee-hive of lofty purposes amid serene delights. A union with Mildred would be wonderful. It would crown life.
And he felt that Mildred would not oppose it. He resolved again and again to ask her; but he simply could not tell her that he loved her as a wife ought to be loved. He and Mildred had become so dear to each other as brother and sister that no other affection seemed possible. To marry her would mean not only an infidelity to Persis, but a more cruel infidelity to Mildred.