Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/455

Rh The Emergency Hospital, planned in the ﬁrst months of his marriage, and abandoned in the general reduction of expenditure at the mills, had now been completed on a larger and more elaborate scale, as a memorial to Bessy. The strict retrenchment of all personal expenses, and the leasing of Lynbrook and the town house, had enabled Amherst, in eighteen months, to lay by enough income to carry out this plan, which he was impatient to see executed as a visible commemoration of his wife’s generosity to Westmore. For Amherst persisted in regarding the gift of her fortune as a gift not to himself but to the mills: he looked on himself merely as the agent of her beneﬁcent intentions. He was anxious that Westmore and Hanaford should take the same view; and the opening of the Westmore Memorial Hospital was therefore to be performed with an unwonted degree of ceremony.

“I am glad Mr. Langhope is coming,” Mrs. Amherst repeated, as they rose from the table. “It shows, dear—doesn’t it?—that he’s really gratiﬁed—that he appreciates your motive.…”

She raised a proud glance to her tall son, whose head seemed to tower higher than ever above her small proportions. Renewed self-conﬁdence, and the habit of command, had in fact restored the erectness to Amherst’s shoulders and the clearness to his eyes. The cleft between the brows was gone, and his veiled [ 439 ]